A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. The quarter note The quarter note is the pulse we instinctively nod our heads to. Your heartbeat is already playing along. Sometimes it’s in plain sight, as with boots-‘n’-cats dance music. Other times it’s suggested via syncopation; James Brown was a master of this (see “Mother Popcorn”). In reggae it’s oft omitted but omnipresent....

Has it really been just two months since the Illinois shelter-in-place order went into effect? Sometimes live music seems like a fading memory. But when the original experience is especially vivid, it’s not hard for a record like To Catch a Bird in a Net of Wind to bring it all back. The album captures a duo set that electric guitarist Tashi Dorji and percussionist Tyler Damon played at the May Chapel in Rosehill Cemetery, which was part of Elastic Arts’ 2018 Exposure Series....

When you were in high school, did you ever sneak into a girl’s house after school? And did her dad happen to come home, after being fired from work, in the midst of the action? So you hid in the bathroom, only for him to come in there and poop while you’re hiding behind the shower curtain? Well, Korporate has. “#BlackChicagoBeLike is meant to show life in Chicago on the other side of Michigan Avenue,” he says....

The pandemic has kept many of us from leaving the house, but honestly, why would you want to? There is too much TV to watch to go outside. Outside doesn’t have Hulu or Netflix or HBO Max. To encourage you to stay home and stay safe, comedian/writer Rima Parikh and myself (two people who watched just as much TV in the Beforetimes) will be diving deep into the shows we’re loving or lovingly hate-watching, social-distance-style, over Google chat....

It’s a nerd-out for people who love typography.” That’s how entrepreneur and Lumpen publisher Ed Marszewski describes Typeforce, the annual typographic-art show he cocurates with Dawn Hancock, the founder and managing director of local design studio Firebelly. This is Typeforce’s seventh year, and the event continues to grow in stature: Marszewski and Hancock received around 200 entries from all around Chicago, the country, and the world. Unfortunately, they can only showcase around 20 artists....

I always come back to classic soul, Motown, and R&B when I need to feel grounded, and lately life has pushed me deep into my collection of 60s party hits—which includes the 1966 single “In the Basement” by soul singers Etta James and Sugar Pie DeSanto. James earned her share of fame with hits such as “I’d Rather Go Blind” and her most recognizable tune, a rendition of “At Last” (first dance for the Obamas in 2008, remember?...

Things got complicated when my girlfriend’s mother made me shotgun weed smoke into her mouth. Later that night, my girlfriend thanks me for being such a good host to her mother. We date for one more year. Don’t notice her accent. Don’t ask her about her home in the south of France or her great-uncle who raised gazelles in his bathtub. Don’t expect to see her ever again. Things got complicated when my girlfriend brought home a pocket pussy....

Michael Gebert Tim Cottini in the backyard that will soon be a steak house’s patio It used to be that every neighborhood had its share of regular-guy steak houses—supper-club-type places where you could take your lady out to get cocktails and a pretty good steak in a grown-up atmosphere, without going downtown and spending the down payment on a new Buick. In Lincoln Square that place was Jury’s, for instance....

S hortly after his inauguration, President Donald Trump issued an executive order blocking entry to the United States by citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries in what was presented as an effort to prevent terrorist attacks. The measure was followed by protests, challenges from several state courts—and crackdowns from Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Even as the debate over the travel ban continued to work its way through the court system—the Supreme Court heard arguments last week and is expected to hand down a final ruling in June—ICE agents rounded up and deported immigrants, notably 199 Iraqis and 91 Somalis....

In 2012, I wrote about a late-1970s cassette recording of a dying carousel in Saint Paul, Minnesota, as part of the Reader‘s In Rotation series. It had been posted by a blog called Tape Findings in 2009, but in 2012 it wasn’t online in any form that I could embed on our website. I recently discovered that this situation had changed: in 2017, somebody named Shogun_Okami uploaded the tape to YouTube....

If loving Chicago is like loving a woman with a broken nose, as Nelson Algren famously wrote, then January is the time when the bandages come off and we discover that the bones didn’t set quite right. Another humiliating Bears season has finally, mercifully come to an end just as yet another arctic winter ramps up, marooning us in our houses with folding chairs protecting our parking spots and Rahm reelection ads inundating our televisions....

Like many families, Dave and Sheila Blanco navigated their daughter’s mental health struggles with little prior knowledge or past experiences to draw from. They learned a lot in the process, and even though it wasn’t enough to save their daughter, their hope is that their hard-gained knowledge can help others. Here are tips from them, along with mental health professionals, for other parents or loved ones of kids facing mental illness:...

The YouTube video of Pussy Riot’s brief provocation—about 48 seconds—at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior on February 21, 2012, makes their actions seem almost anodyne by comparison to, say, Act Up’s protests at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City 30 years ago. Yet the price paid by the women arrested that day, two of whom served 21 months in prison for “hooliganism,” resonates through Barbara Hammond’s kaleidoscopic and chaotic We Are Pussy Riot (or) Everything Is P....

When west-side rapper El Hitta dropped his breakthrough single, “Aww Yea,” in July, he put it out under his original name: El Hitla. “Everybody wanna name theyself off the bad guys,” he told the TRiiBE in December. “Me not knowing what it was, I, you know, end up picking the name Hitler.” After doing more research on the genocidal demagogue and scourge of 20th-century Europe, the rapper changed his stage name to Hitta....

The arts section, no less, of a recent New York Times carried two stories on American racism at its roots. There was an admiring review of a new play, Underground Railroad Game, a kind of comedy whose “smug and familiar humor,” wrote critic Ben Brantley, “winds up exploding in our face, like a poisonous prank cigar.” Underground does, at least, have one foot in the present: two flirting students—one white, one black—who try to explore America’s slave past and fall into an abyss....

Q: I’m an 18-year-old cis hetero girl from Australia and I’ve been listening to your podcast and reading your column since I was 13. Thanks to you I’m pretty open-minded about my sexuality and body. Having said that, I do have a few questions. I started watching porn from a youngish age with no real shame attached but I have some concerns. Care to weigh in? —Concerned About Porn Preferences...

What was billed as a “major address” on the issue of gun violence instead resembled a farce. Most of the mayor’s speech was dedicated to describing the additional resources he plans to give police. He touted body cameras and Tasers for every officer, and called for tougher gun laws and sentences for repeat gun offenders. He also made a pitch for the mentorship of at-risk youth as the crux of a crime prevention strategy, and offered a very brief note about investing in job-training programs....

The grill was attached to the rear of a 32-foot RV adorned with a painting of a bald eagle and an American flag above the words “Support our troops past and present” and “God bless America.” On the side was a Chicago Bears logo, an image of the Chicago skyline, and, in orange, “Monsters of the Midway.” The RV’s co-owner Jerry O’Drobinak cleaned the grill while other members of his party dutifully made preparations for “Packers Day....

“Have you ever used the iPad before?” This mountain of fish positioned at the rear of the dining room is the philosophical center of the space—the former Keefer’s, erased from memory with a massive tropical fish tank to enjoy on your way to restrooms and a giant shark mobile in the bar. White-linen-covered tables and emerald-green chairs are situated in a wide-open dining room that’s ideal for gawking at your fellows as if you’re looking for someone better to talk to at the yacht club....

The 23rd edition of the Chicago Underground Film Festival kicked off Wednesday with a tribute to the late experimental filmmaker Tony Conrad and continues through Sunday at the Logan Theatre. Following are reviews of seven features making their Chicago premieres this year, plus a roundup of six short works screening in various programs. For more information and a complete schedule, visit cuff.org. —J.R. Jones The Love Witch This spellbinding ode to exploitation films of the 1960s and ’70s is impressive not only for its mock-Technicolor hues and period mise-en-scène but also for what lies beneath: a creepy and cunning examination of female fantasy....