Yesterday Lost in Translation-ending Scottish noise-pop band Jesus and Mary Chain announced that they’ll be celebrating the 30th anniversary of their canonical debut Psychocandy by going out on tour. Their trek includes North American dates, one of which is a stop in Chicago on May 5 at the Riviera. Psychocandy is an album I love more for its sound than its songs—but it’s quite a sound, a thicket of hisses, squeals, and clangs with trash-lid drumming by Bobby Gillespie (who eventually became the mastermind of Primal Scream) and major-key melodies delivered in a slack-jawed drawl....

K ay Stepkin’s path to opening the National Vegetarian Museum, the first vegetarian museum in the country, began with James Bond. Stepkin brought her vegetarianism back to Chicago. In 1971—the year the Union Stockyards closed, she points out—she opened up a bakery, the Bread Shop, in Lakeview, near the corner of Halsted and Roscoe. She used only organic whole-grain flour, which she purchased from a health food store on the far south side....

This year’s Chicago Jazz Festival includes a few themed or celebratory events, but the primary mission of its lineup is to capture the sprawling variety of jazz in all its ever-­fragmenting manifestations. (Full disclosure: I volunteer on the committee that programs the fest.) Thursday evening‘s headlining set by Chicago trumpeter Orbert Davis is a commission marking the centennial of the Great Migration, and on Friday night pianist and arranger Carla Bley leads the magnificent Liberation Music Orchestra in a performance that pays homage to bassist Charlie Haden, a fellow founder of the ensemble, who died in 2014....

Sit politely at the South Asian Film Festival or dance wildly at the closing night of the Upside Down. Either way, there are plenty of events for you to do this weekend. Here’s some of what we recommend: Sat 9/30: The Stranger Things-themed pop-up the Upside Down shutters after tonight at the behest of Netflix lawyers. DJ Heaven Malone returns to Emporium Popups (2367 N. Milwaukee) for one last trip into the sensory deprivation tank....

Between Donald Trump’s Republican Party coup, racial tension and protests, and unstable international politics, are we—as more than one recent headline suggests—reliving the dark days of 1968 all over again? It’s tempting to draw a line between Chicago’s past and Cleveland’s present, but the lead-up to the ’68 convention were some of the most tumultuous in American history: The Vietnam war was increasingly looking unwinnable, and young men were resisting the draft in growing numbers....

Let’s get one thing straight: It’s not the long sit I mind. One of my favorite sitting experiences ever was the English Shakespeare Company’s Wars of the Roses heptalogy, which played the International Theatre Festival of Chicago (what an idea, huh?) and literally took days to watch. By comparison, the six-hour running time of Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s Tug of War: Foreign Fire should be an easy stretch to handle. I can understand why Gaines might be attracted to Edward III, aside from the coolness factor of its obscurity: The tale of an English king’s 1346 campaign to assert his sovereignty over France, it takes us back to the beginnings of the grotesque slog known as the Hundred Years War....

It feels like it was yesterday when dance-punk top dog James Murphy bid adieu to LCD Soundsystem, his often cheeky—but also often pensive—mutating hit machine of the 2000s. Maybe that’s because 2011, the year the band split, doesn’t seem too far gone, and 2015 (when they officially reunited) feels like last week—or maybe we pray that it does? The new LCD album, American Dream (Columbia), affirms that even though it’s the band’s second round, Murphy still hasn’t shaken his desire to reflect on his own coolness while standing behind a microphone....

UPDATE: as of Wednesday, July 28 at 9 AM, both Wynonna Judd & Cactus Moser concerts have been canceled. Ticketholders should contact their point of purchase for refund or exchange information. Wynonna Judd’s voice is like chugging diet pop. Her raw, forceful alto sometimes burns a little going down, but the addictive sweetness keeps you coming back for more. Judd has been performing since she was a teenager in the Bay Area in the late 70s, singing occasional backup vocals with her mother, Naomi Judd, for a local country band called the Cowpokes....

The pandemic allowed many to import workplace into living space, thereby reducing risk of illness and death. We talk about missing the experience of an office in addition to the other ways we used to socialize. But what about the commute? Some glorify that in-between time as an opportunity to read or “catch up” on phone-based tasks, but, for me, it was nothing more than an exhausting, obligatory, unpaid extension of the workday....

It’s one thing for a store owner to open a location in a new Chicago neighborhood, but it’s quite another to become so charmed with the area that you actually move there yourself. For Tiffany Paige and Mike Biersma, co-owners of the award-winning boutique Modern Cooperative, “where vintage modern meets handmade,” that’s exactly the seductive pull Hyde Park had on them, the community they’re now proud to call home. Originally Pilsen residents, the couple opened the Modern Cooperative Hyde Park location in November 2015....

To pick the most memorable moments or productions in Chicago theater any year is a daunting endeavor. With hundreds of shows covered by over 15 Reader writers during this past year, too many will be overlooked. But the productions below all had a common theme, and one that felt present in many other shows: the urgent need to tell unvarnished truths in ways both poetic and direct, raw and raucous. These stories were also leavened with hope for redemption, but the kind that only comes after tearing down the false narratives that have shaped our collective and personal histories....

You know how everybody’s Irish on Saint Patrick’s Day? It’s actually worse than that. The starkest failure of originality in Chicago drinking culture is the ubiquity of the ersatz Irish pub. And I’m not talking about watering holes with tangible ties to Mother Ireland or bars of actual character, such as Shinnick’s Pub in Bridgeport, owned by three generations of the same family since 1938. I’m talking about the kind of place whose idea of Irish pride is a shamrock-shaped apostrophe on the sign and Guinness urinal screens....

Q: I’m a 30-year-old straight woman in a three-year relationship with my live-in partner, who is also 30. I love him and he loves me and he wants to make a life with me. However, in this pandemic, the stress is so great that I have lost all desire to have sex. I don’t want anyone touching me right now, not even myself. I feel like I’m in survival mode. I lost the career I love and I’m working four different jobs to make up for it....

With state legislators trying to force the mayor to spend hundreds of millions of TIF dollars on the schools, it looks like the mayor’s taking a page from the George Bluth book of money management. The banana stand being—aw, forget it, just watch the show. That put Emanuel in a bind. It’s hard to ignore a bunch of kids who say they love the librarian who fostered their appreciation for reading....

Who knew a sleeveless button-down shirt could look fashionable? Granted, life coach Andrew Asuncion was covered in Helmut Lang while casually running errands, in an outfit he describes as the “suburbs-of-Tokyo minimalism”—a kind of look he often turns to. “I’ve always been intrigued by the costumes and color palettes in Wong Kar-wai films,” he says. “In his film 2046 [the character] Bai Ling [played by Zhang Ziyi] always had a perfectly cut dress on, but it was actually the same in every scene—just in different fabrics and material....

Chicago DJ and producer Rick Feltes, better known as DJ Rude One, just released a new solo album, Onederful, and a crowd of hip-hop heavies show up to sing his praises on the opening track: Common collaborator Twilight Tone, Gang Starr cofounder DJ Premier, and legendary New York MC Kool G Rap. Feltes, 42, hasn’t released a full-length in 12 years—that’s when he dropped From Now On with Single Minded Pros, his duo with producer Keino West (aka Doc West)....

In early 2016, Jimmy Amutavi had what he considered a happy life. More than a decade had passed since he first emigrated to the U.S. from Kenya with dreams of being a personal trainer. Amutavi had settled down with his wife and young son in Evanston and was renting space at a nearby gym where the lifelong fitness fanatic gave private lessons. But Amutavi’s ties to the gym went beyond business....

The Reader’s archive is vast and varied, going back to 1971. Every day in Archive Dive, we’ll dig through and bring up some finds. I was going to write about the @MayorEmanuel Twitter feed, which ended its glorious run almost exactly seven years ago this past weekend with the fictional Rahm getting sucked into a time vortex. And now all I can hear is that music, and suddenly everything just fucking…...

Calling Mint Mile singer and guitarist Tim Midyett an underdog is a bit silly, because he’s spent three decades cranking out jams in some of America’s best guitar bands, including Silkworm and Bottomless Pit, and now plays bass in Sunn O))). All the same, he’s never gotten his due as a songwriter! Mint Mile have released a string of tasty EPs since 2015, and on Friday, March 20, they dropped their full-length debut, the double LP Ambertron, via Comedy Minus One....