The Old Believer The Atlas Moth, the massively heavy, always-on-tour local experimental-metal quintet celebrate their homecoming tonight—having just returned home from a huge trip out with Between the Buried and Me—with a headlining show at Cobra Lounge (Northless and Rollo Tomasi open). Formed in 2007, the band has perfected their spacey sludge metal over the years, and today’s 12 O’Clock Track, “The Sea Beyond,” off of last year’s The Old Believer (Profound Lore), showcases the band’s tremendous growth....

At 5 PM Saturday, March 21, Governor J.B. Pritzker’s COVID-19 Executive Order No. 8, aka the Stay at Home order, took effect. Here’s a daily-ish journal of how Reader staff, our friends, family—and our pets—are spending our time. Medicine live at Lounge Ax on January 30, 1993 Choirs doing indie-pop covers—notably The Chorus doing Camera Obscura’s “Lloyd, I’m Ready to Be Heartbroken” in Victoria, BC in 2018 and the Coastal Sound Youth Choir performing the New Pornographers’s “Letter From an Occupant” in Vancouver in 2015 97X – Rumblings from the Big Bush podcast about the cult-legendary southwest Ohio radio station (1983-2004) and webstream (RIP 2010) What we’re cooking:...

One of the most difficult moves in professional figure skating competitions is a triple axel, which requires the skater to leap forward from the outside edge of one skate blade, rotate three and a half times in the air, and land on the back outside edge of the opposite foot. Only eight women have landed the jump in competition, and Tonya Harding is one of them. In director Craig Gillespie’s new biopic I, Tonya, Harding (Margot Robbie) reminisces about having been the first American woman to accomplish this feat in 1991....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Tuesday, July 5, 2016. Bronzeville Arts and Recreation Center finally ready to open Following more than ten years of community meetings, plans, demolition, and construction, an $18.3 million arts and recreation center opens its doors this week. A joint project from Chicago Park District and CPS, the Ellis Park facility will provide Bronzeville and surrounding communities with a full-size swimming pool, gymnasium, dance classes, and more....

Soundcloud rap is shaping up to be the site of the latest music-biz gold rush. Lil Pump, Lil Skies, and Lil Xan already have major-label deals, and last week Billboard broke the news that Interscope had signed Chicagoland rapper Juice Wrld to a deal allegedly worth $3 million. That dollar amount comes as a lil shock, given that Juice remains fairly unknown and relatively green. He’s been uploading music to Soundcloud for about three years, but as he told rap podcast No Jumper earlier this month, he’s played only a couple shows—and it wasn’t till a year ago that one of his tracks managed to accumulate 10,000 Soundcloud plays....

From an early age, Ariel Couzan was fascinated by the ancient Egyptians, whose skin was the same shade of brown as hers. The 27-year-old Loop transplant smiles and rattles off stories about gods and goddesses and their legendary adventures. Couzan incorporates elements of this obsession into her style with feline earmuffs and a Cleopatra­-like bob with gold dreadlock cuffs, topped with a hat whose brim is adorned with a hieroglyphs-inspired design; her zip-up windbreaker has a sphinx face....

There’s a difference between liking seafood and liking food that tastes like the sea smells at low tide. I’ll probably never entirely appreciate bottarga, a delicacy of salt-cured fish roe that’s powerfully fishy even in minuscule doses. Blame whatever neurochemistry shaped my preferences and aversions—you certainly can’t fault my seafood-rich Floridian upbringing—but when a server at Sink | Swim placed on our table an order of cracker-crisp lavash covered in shavings of bottarga (“batarga” on the menu), I could almost hear that classic-cartoon sound effect of a garbage scow’s foghorn blowing and seagulls cawing....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Monday, June 27, 2016. Shooting of three-year-old leads to a truce between Woodlawn gangs When three-year-old Devon Quinn was shot in Woodlawn on Father’s Day, Corey Brooks took action. Brooks, the pastor at New Beginnings Church, decided to broker a truce between gangs in order to stop the violence. “We had everyone sit across from one another and tried to work everything out,” he said....

Thinkstock Extremely important punctuation. I spent a couple of hours at the kitchen table Wednesday morning rooting through Tuesday’s papers. “Usually I circle anything I might want to get back to,” I told my wife, “but apparently I didn’t this time.” “Please stop putting two spaces between sentences,” she pleads. “It makes you look like a dinosaur.”

Mary Halvorson Octet, Away With You (Firehouse 12) Last year guitarist Mary Halvorson released one of her best albums, a peculiar solo recording of jazz standards and cover songs rendered in her own inimitable style—Meltframe privileges her wonderfully jagged improvisational approach as she reimagines the structure and scale of the tunes. This year she’s dropped an even better record that showcases her continuously improving skills as an arranger and writer....

QWhen I was 15, I had a three-month-long sexual relationship with a 32-year-old woman. She was a friend of the family, and my parents were going through a divorce. I stayed with her for the summer, and she initiated a sexual relationship. Looking back, I can see that she had been grooming me. We used to have conversations online and via e-mail that were very inappropriate considering our age difference. The relationship ended when I went home, but she remained flirty....

Tal Rosenberg, Reader digital content editor Wussy The existence of this great Cincinnati band addresses an important question: What if Yo La Tengo sounded more like Archers of Loaf and Drive-By Truckers? I’m not sure Wussy have matched the galvanizing fuzziness of their first two albums, but 2011’s Strawberry comes close, and “Teenage Wasteland” (off last year’s Attica!) is the finest song they’ve ever cut. Rob Nicholas, singer-songwriter The Green Mill When’s the last time you went to the Green Mill?...

ARTIST: Ryan Duggan SHOW: Bric-a-Brac fifth anniversary party with Glyders, Star Tropics, Ovef Ow, Wyd, and Slushy on Sat 6/16 MORE INFO: ryanduggan.com

“Go back to where you started, or as far back as you can, examine all of it, travel your road again and tell the truth about it. Sing or shout or testify or keep it to yourself: but know whence you came.”—James Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket But unlike the sexually arid world of Letts’s troubled Weston clan, Colston’s play draws the same connections between spiritual and sexual freedom that Baldwin embodied in his work....

Don Bierman In a 1983 debate with Mayor Jane Byrne and Cook County state’s attorney Richard M. Daley, Harold Washington called attention to the enormous black unemployment rate in Chicago, a problem that continues more than 30 years later. Tonight at 7 PM, WTTW will televise the last of the three mayoral runoff debates between incumbent Rahm Emanuel and Cook County commissioner Jesus “Chuy” Garcia. The Tribune says moderator Phil Ponce should focus the debate on “the only question that matters”—how to fix the city’s finances....

America is a large, ethnically diverse region, and so is Asia, a fact that has always made the long-running Asian American Showcase an amorphous player among Chicago’s film festivals. The Showcase covers so many ethnicities that the only commonality is the friction between those cultures and the American melting pot, which gives the festival a thematic consistency many of its peers lack. Much of this year’s schedule, screening at Gene Siskel Film Center, consists of serious documentaries: Right Footed, about an armless Filipino-American who becomes a disability advocate; People Are the Sky, about a U....

Well, that was weird. And funny. And awesome. If anything let the air out of the set, it was the Danzig’s stage banter. He followed each song with a long, awkward pause while he obviously caught his breath into the microphone. And then his commentary rolled out. With just a few words, Danzig transformed his image from Prince of Darkness to Beavis and Butt-Head. My favorite quip was probably “I can’t hear shit up here....

The Purge: Election Year is a sheep in wolf’s clothing. Billed as a dystopian thriller, it is in fact a naively hopeful, flag-waving piece of pro-American agitprop. Like The Purge (2013) and The Purge: Anarchy (2015), Election Day takes place in the near future after the economy has collapsed and a cabal of old white men called the New Founding Fathers of America (NFFA) has instituted an annual lawless free-for-all called the Purge to cleanse the country of undesirables and its own aggressive impulses....

At 5 PM Saturday, March 21, Governor J.B. Pritzker’s COVID-19 Executive Order No. 8, aka the Stay at Home order, took effect. Here’s a daily-ish journal of how Reader staff, our friends, family—and our pets—are spending our time. Carole Baskin refuting Netflix’s Tiger King What we’re listening to:

Welcome to the Reader‘s briefing for Friday, January 26, 2018. City Hall agrees to comply with Department of Justice request for immigration documents The city of Chicago has agreed to hand over the immigration documents requested by the Department of Justice under threat of subpoena, according to the Sun-Times. “We have seen too many examples of the threat to public safety represented by jurisdictions that actively thwart the federal government’s immigration enforcement—enough is enough,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a statement....