In an abrupt conclusion to a federal district court hearing Tuesday, Judge John Robert Blakey announced that he was ruling in favor of the city of Chicago and the Chicago Park District and “terminating” the lawsuit brought by the activist group Protect Our Parks (POP) that sought to keep the Obama Presidential Center out of historic Jackson Park. But the judge also agreed with attorneys for the city (at the hearing, that was Michael Scodro of the law firm of Mayer Brown), who argued that the level of protection for parkland varies depending on whether it was ever actually underwater....

courtesy Perspective Gallery The winning entry: “Catrina with Prey” by Jill Flyer The Perspective Gallery may be a small collective of 19 photographers located in Evanston, but it’s had no shortage of interest in Lens, its annual juried photography exhibition, now in its fifth year. Lens 2015 received submissions from more than 180 entrants, says gallery board member Chris Schneberger, about one-tenth of which were from overseas. “We get a wide range of work,” Schneberger says....

Arlena Williams’s evenings off work are filled with the sound of trains rumbling past the trailer where she lives with her daughter in the south suburb of Blue Island. The 45-year-old’s home, nestled within a Cook County forest preserve, abuts a transportation yard that services companies carrying, among other things, goods manufactured by workers like her—one of only about 150 female members of Chicago’s Pipefitters Local 597. An estimated $58 billion worth of exports travels out from Chicago annually, lumbering along tracks extending across the country....

The Chicago Sun-Times is dumping its singular arts critic, Hedy Weiss. Sun-Times editor in chief Chris Fusco issued this statement: “Today is Hedy Weiss’ last day as a Sun-Times employee. She’s had a remarkable 33-year career covering the theater and arts scene in Chicago, and we wish her well. The Sun-Times is excited about Chicago’s burgeoning arts community, and we look forward to rolling out new coverage plans in the future....

Mike Sula Kimchi Fries, Takos Koreanos I’ve gone on record many times with the unpopular assertion that most poutine is unfit for hyena chow. That said I’m not above appreciating exceptions. The orthodox poutine at Montreal’s undersung Main Deli Steak House may have softened my stance. (Why wait in line outside Schwartz’s when there are open tables at the Main right across the street?) Mike Sula Kalbi burrito, Takos Koreanos Tacos Koreanos doesn’t really leave many hybrids unanswered....

Warning: This review contains spoilers. For months, Kiesha (played by Birgundi Baker) was held captive, and a determined Ronnie eventually finds her. But that redemption comes at a price when he’s shot in retaliation for that wrongful murder. Before he dies, though, he becomes what he aimed to be: a man who would make his grandmother proud. The season three finale itself neatly wrapped up most of the storylines—an action critiqued by some as feeling anticlimatic....

UPDATE Friday, March 13: this event has been canceled. Refunds available at point of purchase. “I would let [insert name here] ruin my life” is a phrase that anyone who’s radiated their eyes with thirsty comments online over the past few years will recognize as a hallmark of the genre. What does it mean? If Dex (Michael Vizzi) and Shellie (Allison Plott) feel that way about each other in Leslye Headland’s The Layover—a total masterpiece, ultimately just as devastating as it is hot—presented by The Comrades under Drew Shirley’s direction, as I contend they do, what does that feeling entail?...

The final performance of Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind December 30 left me with two black eyes, a scraped knee, and a busted pair of glasses. Too Much Light was one of the first productions I reviewed (in 1988, at Stage Left’s old space on Clark Street, now occupied by Chicago Comics), and since then I’ve popped in every once in a while to see if it retained the vitality, relevance, and radical intelligence of its initial run....

Part of being a lifelong Cubs fan is that you never bother to plan what will happen when the Cubs win the World Series, because you’re too busy worrying about other, more likely possibilities. Like what to do if you’re in a plane crash, or your house burns down, or, I don’t know, a sea of angry merpeople storms Loyola Beach. Now it’s the morning after. I don’t think the world has ended, or maybe the afterlife is a lot like the regular world, except that it’s November 3, and the window is open, the sun is out, and I can hear and smell someone cutting grass outside....

“When you travel a lot,” says Kathy Pulkrabek, one of the hosts of the podcast XX Will Travel, “and you tell people about it, you kind of see their eyes glaze over.” The worst travel emergency Bellina, 35, has ever experienced was when she needed to have a toenail removed during a trip to Cusco, Peru. “They had to call in a doctor to actually remove it and the only place to do this was in a hostel....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Wednesday, June 29, 2016. Thousands of bodies, old cemetery lie underneath soon-to-be-renovated Oak Park Avenue Oak Park Avenue, on the northwest side, lies on top of the old Dunning cemetery and consequently, thousands of skeletons. The little-known cemetery holds the bodies of the city’s “poorest and sickest residents who died between 1890 and 1912.” Construction workers will move the road east in order to avoid disturbing the human remains....

All the Ships at Sea The writer and filmmaker Dan Sallitt had something of a career breakthrough in 2013 when his film The Unspeakable Act received fairly widespread distribution and wound up on a few end-of-year lists, including my own. (You can also purchase it on DVD or stream it on iTunes thanks to home video stalwarts Cinema Guild.) Previously, Sallitt was probably best known as a film critic and former Reader staffer, something he discussed in an interview with Ben Sachs....

After 16 years at Chicago’s classical music station, WFMT 98.7 FM, Executive Vice President and General Manager Steve Robinson is leaving, today. On the eve of his departure, which was announced last month, Robinson answered a few questions about the station, his long run there, and the future of the business. I inherited a healthy station. But I increased the amount of live broadcasts that we do. We’re now doing something like 250 a year....

Q: My boyfriend and I were friends for a couple of years (we’re both 30-year-old gay men), then I stopped traveling around the world and pursued him. We’ve been boyfriends for a year and a half now. We were both happy and we had sex on a regular basis during the first year. I’m more into anal (as a top) but we mainly did oral because he isn’t into anal. We tried a few times early on but every time I mention it now he doesn’t seem keen, so I’ve left it alone....

The music of Stephen Malkmus can roughly be divided among his three main bands: Pavement, the Jicks, and Silver Jews. For better or for worse, Pavement tend to overshadow the other two—their rough, fuzzed-out music and enigmatic, humorous lyrics made them alt-rock darlings during the genre’s 90s heyday, and their stamp on indie rock has been felt ever since. But though Pavement were done with making music in 1999, Malkmus was not....

ARTIST: Daniel MacAdam SHOW: Sumac, Jon Mueller, and Nordra at Township on Tue 8/9 MORE INFO: crosshairchicago.com

Miralda will be presenting slides from the show at Saturday’s meeting of the Chicago Foodways Roundtable. Collaborator Stephan Palmié, Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago, joins Miralda for the discussion, and together they’ll give a presentation on the book they’re working on.

Speaking of all the great Japanese food in Arlington Heights, a new strip-mall spot opened last January, joining notable north suburban izakaya like Kurumaya and Sankyu in cementing the northwest suburbs’ rep as the place to be for Japanese drinking food (much as they are for Korean drinking food). In truth Yakitori Boogytori, from the folks behind Ramen Takeya and Wasabi, isn’t officially an izakaya—it’s a yakitori-ya, grilling skewered meats and a few vegetables over white-hot binchotan charcoal....

Striding Lion’s The Great and Terrible Faustus guides the audience through a devilish fun house of sorts, offering seven different paths with seven different characters, each of whom gets a different glimpse of Faustus as the doctor tries to resist Lucifer’s temptations. Every character represents a different deadly sin; during my journey I followed the velvet-suit-clad Lust (Erik Strebig). While the dancing is impressive, perhaps even more so are the silent acting and eerie singing; the music all comes from the stage of the main theater, where different groups are led to sit and watch as their leaders sing standards like “Dream a Little Dream” and “Fever....

I first heard tenor saxophonist David S. Ware in 1988, when he released the trio album Passage to Music (Silkheart), whose scalding free jazz arrived like a bolt from the blue—simultaneously a throwback to the golden age of the 1960s “new thing” and a thoroughly contemporary, no-holds-barred manifestation of sonic seeking. I became a huge fan, and followed Ware as he turned the trio into a quartet with the addition of Matthew Shipp and moved from the great Japanese label DIW to Columbia Records in the late 90s (thanks to the advocacy of fan Branford Marsalis)....