I quit drinking coffee last year in an unsuccessful attempt to silence the voices in my head. Apart from a few Starbucks-fueled road trips I’d been relatively caffeine free for months. So I was pretty out of shape when I drank—fairly inhaled—the Military Latte at Sawada Coffee. That’s the signature drink of champion latte artist Hiroshi Sawada, the namesake of the newish coffee shop attached to the back of Hogsalt Hospitality’s Green Street Smoked Meats....

It might seem strange to think of the Poetry Foundation as in need of a booster—after all, it was one of two top finalists for the title Best Poetry Organization, running off against Young Chicago Authors. But, one, never underestimate the power of Louder Than a Bomb, YCA’s massively popular annual poetry slam. Two, though well-known and certainly well-endowed, the Poetry Foundation seems to operate a little under the radar. At least I’d bet most people have no idea it’s offering free programming almost daily....

Susan Messing will always remember the opening night of her weekly show Messing With a Friend: that same evening Jack Farrell, a student in an improv class she taught, almost died from a ruptured aorta. As her student was rushed to the hospital, she took to the stage for her two-person, anything-goes improv show. “That’s how the real show opened up that night,” Messing says. “That’s how I remember when we started doing the show, because he almost died....

Full house Between the lines Pilsen’s Maybe Sunday Collective was founded by two School of the Art Institute of Chicago alums, Jason Guo and McKenzie Thompson. In honor of their alma mater’s 150th anniversary last year, they created a line of unisex T-shirts featuring the work of four celebrated SAIC grads: Katherine Bernhardt, Brian Calvin, Zak Prekop, and—coolest of all—Chris Ware, who inspired a tee containing panels from his 2012 graphic novel Building Stories....

Drag is embedded into the mainstream in a way it has never been before. While this can be chalked up to the widespread commercial success of shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race, it’s by no means the only media depiction of the art form. Filmmakers have been documenting queer performance subcultures—from drag to pageantry and ballroom—for decades. Take Frank Simon’s The Queen, or Jennie Livingston’s Paris is Burning, or Sara Jordenö’s Kiki, among many others....

Saturday, 4:55 PM Call me Happy Meal®. As sudden late afternoon rains swirl and eddy overhead, we’ve been evacuated from Union Park, and the dozens of us gathered at the McDonald’s on Lake Street have the shivery, put-upon look common to dogs given an unwelcome bath. The plebes are all wet. Like many journalists, I’ve gotten my filthy mitts on VIP passes for music festivals in the past. Sadly, the VIP experience at Pitchfork consists largely of endlessly scanning an enclosed swath of park perhaps 500 feet on a side and feeling a needling sense of disappointment that so many people you respect (and quite a few you don’t) perform similarly unimportant tasks but are obviously far better compensated for it than you....

Brian Hieggelke, publisher of Newcity, has written a long, thoughtful proposal to “keep Chicago a two-newspaper town.” The occasion for Hieggelke’s exercise is last week’s astonishing announcement that Michael Ferro, principal owner of the Sun-Times, would from now on be a silent partner because he’d just become the largest single shareholder of Tribune Publishing. Because of Ferro’s dominant position in both camps, “everyone is assuming this is the end of Chicago as a two-newspaper town,” Hieggelke writes; therefore, the first thing he thinks the Sun-Times needs to do is get Ferro out of the picture completely....

Immediately after the 2016 presidential election, Tim Kinsella and a coterie of collaborators gathered at Chicago’s Minbal studios to work through their feelings about America’s new nightmare. It took them two days to record an album of solemn, fretful indie rock, and then it took them more than three years to release it. HIH NO/ON (Joyful Noise) came out late last month under the name Friend/Enemy, which Kinsella and HIH NO/ON synth player Todd Mattei used for 2002’s Ten Songs....

For the last few days I’ve been sifting through the tea leaves, searching for clues to help me figure whether Chuy or Rahm will win this mayoral election. The Mayor of Chicago Rahm Emanuel came by my job, still can’t stand this muthafucka tho A photo posted by Albert Griffith (@gqthateacha) on Jan 15, 2015 at 8:19am PST A prediction I’d pretend I hadn’t made, if not for the fact that Peter Holderness—the world’s greatest videographer—was on hand to record it....

To help you keep track of the al fresco entertainment this summer, here’s a roundup of more than 30 free films playing this week: Moonstruck Tue 7/19, 6:30 PM, Millennium Park, 201 E. Randolph, 312-742-1168, cityofchicago.org. Hotel Transylvania 2 Tue 7/19, 8:55 PM, Mozart Park, 2036 N. Avers, 312-742-7535, chicagoparkdistrict.com. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 Wed 7/20, 8:30 PM, Owens Park, 8800 S. Clyde, 312-747-6709, chicagoparkdistrict.com. Goosebumps Thu 7/21, 8:15 PM, Trebes Park, 2250 N....

Veteran Bay Area reedist Larry Ochs has often worked within meticulously arranged compositional vehicles—in his pioneering saxophone quartet ROVA, high-flying improvisation is rigorously woven into the fabric of each piece. In recent years he’s increasingly spent time in looser, more spontaneous configurations where written material plays a less prominent role, but he continues to see composition as a crucial tool. In a short liner-note essay from his group Fictive Five’s eponymous 2015 debut album (released on Tzadik Records), he describes the music as “pieces that invite musicians in, even as they’re being pushed out and into the wild....

As the Boredoms have repeatedly proved, you can’t have too many drummers. If anything, the lineup of Portland-based instrumental collective Secret Drum Band needs more—on their recent second album, Chuva (Moon Glyph), they’ve usually got two or three at a time. I have irrationally strong feelings about Crash Worship, but I won’t dispute the comparison beyond saying that SDB sound way less evil. I like the rough-and-ready feel of Chuva: the unfussy, energetic drumming centers acoustic rather than electronic sounds, and the elements that might read as “new age” (heavily reverbed chants, drifty synths, wilderness ambience) stick to supporting roles, inflecting the percussion with extra color and texture....

Guacamole is delicious. It’s a nearly perfect food, a crowd-pleaser that’s easy to make and even easier to shovel into your mouth atop tortilla chips. For the cilantro averse among us, though, there’s one problem: nearly every version of guacamole involves cilantro. OK, most people prefer it that way, and I’m not trying to take away anyone’s cilantro—but for those of us who hate it, it’s the one flavor that can ruin any food....

Norwegian singer Susanne Sundfør found international success with her 2015 album Ten Love Songs (Sonnet Sounds), a slick recording that situated her opulent folk-derived melodies within fizzy arrangements propelled by EDM-style production. Her soaring vocals shine in such jacked-up surroundings, but the album’s treacly synthesizers and four-on-the-floor grooves tended to flatten the refined beauty of her tunes into lowest-common-denominator pop. Still, that formula led to heavy international touring and a growing profile, which makes it remarkable that on her recent follow-up, Music for People in Trouble (Bella Union), Sundfør utterly turns the table in favor of delicate intimacy....

The nondescript brick building along an industrial stretch of Elston Avenue seems just the sort of unremarkable spot where a group of privacy advocates would congregate. Inside Pumping Station: One, an Avondale “hackerspace” where about 200 tech-obsessed tinkerers pool money to share tools and work space, the 50 seats in a second-floor room are filling fast. Surrounded by wall shelving brimming with parts for computers and various other electronic doodads, most in the crowd stare into the screens of bestickered laptops as they wait for a presentation to begin....

This week’s most prominent new release is Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread, featuring what actor Daniel Day-Lewis claims will be his final performance. Day-Lewis is famous for an approach to role-playing so immersive that it blurs the line between art and athletics: he might prepare for a part by experiencing his subject’s living conditions (he “learned to live off the land” to play a Native American tribesman in The Last of the Mohicans) or stay in character between takes (during production of My Left Foot, for which he won an Oscar, he insisted on remaining in his character’s wheelchair and being spoon-fed by the crew)....

A stone’s throw from the kitsch and luxe of the Magnificent Mile, in a north-facing window on Ontario, the Indian god Ganesh merges with the figure of a child impaled through the frontal lobe with a martial pole. Beyond them, a tapestry hangs, where the silhouette of a lynched woman forms a dark blot against a wall of flames, rioters running beneath her feet. To the right, a shirtless boy with tattoos and scraped knees sits astride a bison with a child in his arms and a dusty American flag slung over one shoulder, while a few yards away fringed Vodou flags beaded by Haitian weavers glitter boldly on the wall....

In honor of this special issue dedicated to what’s lost and gained over the last year, allow me to say a few words about Chicago’s legendary Democratic machine. In the last year there have been two highly praised movies lambasting the wretched behavior of Chicago’s political bosses. Madigan, Burke, Alderwoman Carrie Austin, the late state senator Martin Sandoval, the Acevedos of the near southwest side—all have been bounced from office or caught in scandals....

Based on the early returns, we’re projecting the White Sox and Cubs to both win the World Series this year (somehow). They’re on pace to finish the regular season 162-0. In between pitches, I was checking Baseball Almanac‘s historical website on my phone. I knew that the Sox and Cubs had often struggled out of the gate, so I thought it might have been ten years, maybe even 20, since both clubs had gone 2-0 in the same year....

The X-Files reunion during Wizard World Chicago last Saturday opened on a cringe-inducing note. Moments after the quartet of cast members, including stars David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, strolled onto the stage and sat down for a 45-minute Q&A session, a young spiky-haired panel moderator kicked things off with an utterly vacuous question: “So . . . what’s your favorite pizza?” One model of success at comic conventions is B-movie idol Bruce Campbell, who wears the events like a second skin....