Time was when the weeks leading up to the Chicago Blues Festival were nearly another festival in themselves. Those days are gone, but the city’s blues clubs will still be jumping all weekend. Underpublicized neighborhood joints will throw shows worth noting too, and museums, libraries, and nonprofits will host special events. On Saturday, After-Words Books sponsors a “Jazz, Blues, and Beyond Bus Tour” of musical landmarks famous and obscure. On Sunday, worthwhile shows include a performance by blues prodigy Jamiah Rogers at River Roast, the redoubtable Jimmy Johnson doing his regular gig at the Lagunitas taproom, and a Blues Fest satellite show (with Vince “Lefty” Johnson, David Herrero, and others) at what’s still being called the Maxwell Street Market but is actually several blocks east....

The sites in the list below let you talk to people without the interference of loud music, fake profiles, and war pigs. You will find singles in your area, complete with pictures, bios, and stats. The searches filter to people who match your preferences. Still, a lot of hookup and dating sites are purportedly fake. Learning this the hard way can be costly and time-consuming. Can you really get laid on the best totally free hookup websites?...

Chicago rapper Vic Mensa has had a career trajectory unlike many other Chicago artists the past decade. After rising to national prominence in the early 2010s as front man of Kids These Days, he became a solo star, delivering a sharp debut mixtape (2013’s Innanetape) and a career-making hip-house single (2014’s “Down On My Luck”) en route to signing with Jay-Z’s Roc Nation label in 2015. Since then, Mensa has bared his soul in a smattering of stylistically scattered EPs, dropped the lucid 2017 studio full-length The Autobiography, and swung for the fences with the 2019 agitprop pop-punk album 93Punx, produced by Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker—a memorable curiosity that feels destined to find a cult audience....

Rafael Esparza was a “weird kid” who hated spaghetti. Specifically he did not like his grandmother’s cheesy, chile-spiked pasta casserole, the SpaghettiOs of every Mexican American kid’s diet. It was discussions about this sort of undersung contribution to Mexican cuisine that inspired the partnership. AbouJamra, a former GM for the DMK Restaurants group (among many more varied hospitality gigs), used to deliver chai to Finom, where Esparza was making magical Hungarian dishes with little more than an induction burner....

Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago. Coriama Couture is a triple threat—or should I say a triple A? The artist, aesthetician, and activist is writing and hosting a soon-to-debut webseries about nonconforming identities and queerness in Chicago, and helming the monthly discussion series and podcast Sex KiKi, which she created to celebrate liberated femininity. And she has designs to open a shop inspired by gender and sexual fluidity....

Three Disney World cast members find themselves trapped in the smoldering, electrified remains of the “It’s a Small World” ride in Jillian Leff and Joe Lino’s darkly comedic 85-minute exercise in tonal irony. Like a theme-park-set contemporary No Exit, the trio of clashing personalities—an impaled Mickeyphile (Stephanie Shum), a downtrodden company skeptic (Jackie Seijo), and a conservative, murmuring zealot (Pat Coakley)—work with and against one another to survive an unspecified disaster that’s wreaking havoc across the park and maybe the world at large....

Of course things don’t go exactly as Wisenberg planned, but the wonderful and beautiful thing about this essay is how she avoids the temptation to make fun of the sorority women and their rush rituals. Instead, it turns into a lovely meditation on time passing and how it feels to grow older and wonder about how your life would be different if you took a different path when you were young....

For film critics, covering the Sundance Film Festival is practically a rite of passage. Sundance has aimed to nurture independent filmmaking since its inception, and its continued success has meant that the films it chooses to accept (and the directors behind them) can be made or broken there. Attendance means audiences get to view potential blockbusters and stars before they get launched into the stratosphere. Everyone’s either looking for emerging trends and talent, or just the latest offering from industry veterans....

For our latest issue, Ryan Smith delved into the seedy history of pinball and the champion player Roger Sharpe, who helped lift the ban on the game while his sons are leading today’s renaissance. We photographed Roger and his sons Josh and Zach, the next generation of champion pinball competitors, at the Stern Pinball factory in Elk Grove Village, IL. It’s the oldest and largest manufacturer and designer of pinball machines in the world....

On the first-floor stage of iO Theater eight years ago, the members of Cook County Social Club started performing scenes about fellatio. Why? It’s unclear. Cook County Social Club moves at lightning speed—troupe member Brendan Jennings got on his knees without hesitation, ready to perform stage fellatio on Mark Raterman, as per the scene’s needs, and Raterman immediately turned around and dropped trou. Cook County Social Club consists of Jennings, Raterman, Bill Cochran, Greg Hess, and Tim Robinson (who was a cast member on Saturday Night Live for one season)....

It was a bitter cold February day—the kind of day that Chicago is famous for, and the kind of day that makes lifelong residents wonder why they haven’t broken down and moved to Miami—when I first explored Gethsemane Garden Center. On this particularly brutal day, I met up with a friend to take a walk around Andersonville. In a pre-pandemic reality, we might have gotten lunch indoors or simply rescheduled, but the need for human interaction outweighed the frigid temperatures, and we weren’t going to risk exposure to the virus to get it....

ARTIST: Chema Skandal SHOW: Feel the Rhythm with DJs E.N.G., Sonido Tritón, and Bryan “Selektah” Martin at Crown Tap Room on Sat 1/30 MORE INFO: chemaskandal.com

When people visit the Bean in Millennium Park, the first thing they see is themselves. The large, warped bodies and surroundings reflecting off the surface of the sculpture are a significant part of the artwork’s appeal. Tony Tasset‘s Artists Monument—which will be unveiled this Saturday, February 20, in Grant Park, in a ceremony presented by the Chicago Park District, the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, and Kavi Gupta Gallery—is also informed by self-absorption....

Keep busy in Chicago this weekend with our recommended events: Sat 7/9-Sun 7/10: Enjoy some of Chicago’s best burger spots—including Butcher & the Burger, Fatso’s Last Stand, and Square Bar & Grill—all in one place at the Roscoe Village Burger Fest (Roscoe between Damen and Levitt) plus two live-music stages and a “Kid’s Zone” full of crafts and activities for the little ones. 11 AM-10 PM

Architectural preservation? Admirable! Especially in Chicago now, with the built environment giving Al Capone some competition as the city’s global identity. It’s a feel-good thing. And it’s environmentally correct. A case in point is playing out in Edgewater. At least one developer would like to save the Nordine house. Andrew Ahitow, of City Pads, has a plan that would repurpose the mansion while expanding it into an apartment complex. Ahitow told me his company put in a “competitive” but unsuccessful purchase offer contingent on getting landmark status (which could allow for possible government financial incentives)....

Cecile Richards has been president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the Planned Parenthood Action Fund for 12 years, but this May she’ll step down. Richards would later experience a bit of deja vu, if only just in the sense of feeling part of a conspiracy, after meeting with Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump at a Trump golf course in New Jersey in February 2017 about federal funding for the nonprofit....

Would you have bet that this year would end with a massive expansion of legalized gambling in Illinois—a whole new crop of casinos, racinos (combination racetrack-casinos), slots, and even online sports betting—all justified as the way to get legislative approval for a long-sought Chicago casino, but there would still be no Chicago casino in the works? It looked like a done deal at the end of June, when Governor J.B. Pritzker signed an 800-page omnibus bill that—among other things—authorized six new casinos, 5,000 sports betting kiosks, and nearly doubled the number of gambling positions in the state, to just under 80,000....

This has been a helluva week for Second City news. On Wednesday, Financial Times first published reports of an imminent sale of the comedy behemoth to private equity firm ZMC, owned by Strauss Zelnick. Zelnick is the CEO of Take-Two Interactive Software, home of the Grand Theft Auto game franchise. On Thursday, those rumors were confirmed by ZMC; they declined to name the purchase price, but FT said that “the company was expected to fetch about $50 [million]....

When Chicago MC Probcause teamed up with local hip-hop duo the Palmer Squares to release an EP as Junkyard Samurai last year, it seemed like a perfect fit. As the Palmer Squares, rappers Acumental and Terminal Knowledge have dropped track after track stuffed with voluble, flamboyant lines delivered with a playful bounce. Probcause can also make his words ricochet like rubber, and his whimsical sensibilities, combined with hard-as-nails rapping, have helped him cross over into EDM—he’s delivered steely performances on overdriven productions by the likes of Griz and Gramatik....

The Soft Pink Truth’s new album, Shall We Go On Sinning So That Grace May Increase? (Thrill Jockey), is a soundtrack for contemplation, discovery, and the seeking of truth. The solo project of Baltimore musician Drew Daniel, best known for his work in experimental duo Matmos, the Soft Pink Truth started in response to a challenge. After Matmos released 2001’s A Chance to Cut Is a Chance to Cure, which featured glitchy electronic sounds built from samples of medical procedures, British house producer and musician Matthew Herbert dared Daniel to apply his inventive style to house music....