Update Wed 2/20: The lineup for the Chicago Votes/Babes Only concert has changed since publication. Queen Key has been added to the top of the bill, and DJ Chava has been replaced by DJ Mo Mami. According to new flyers for the event, mayoral candidates Amara Enyia and Toni Preckwinkle will also make appearances. On Thursday, February 21, nonpartisan nonprofit Chicago Votes teams up with Babes Only, a group dedicated to empowering women, to throw a show at Chop Shop celebrating voting rights and looking forward to the mayoral election....

São Paulo singer-songwriter and guitarist Sessa called his 2019 debut Grandeza (Boiled), which means “greatness” in Portuguese. The record lives up to its title; Sessa’s stripped-down, minimalist bossa nova is both dreamy and raw. His beguiling combination of amateurishness and suaveness, as well as the juxtaposition of Spanish guitars with female backing vocals and Afro-Brazilian percussion, recalls Baden Powell and Vinicius de Moraes’s great 1966 Os Afro Sambas. “Flor do Real” could almost be an outtake from that record, if not for its trippy, sexy lyrics: “To live in the guts of those who make us horny / It’s good / Fucking is the pleasure of sound,” Sessa and his backing vocalists sing (in Portuguese) with detached innocence....

Shannon Noll wasn’t sure what to expect going into top surgery, partially because for so long they thought it would never be possible. But once they got a job with a tech company that offered insurance covering the procedure, they were surprised by some of the choices that had to be made. “They asked me where I want my nipples put back on, and I was like, ‘Does anyone want them not in the normal place?...

The last five years have been terrible for Chicago barbecue. For reasons I still don’t fathom, a relentless plague of half-assed new barbecue restaurants multiplied as insidiously as split-face concrete block, and provoked a kind of fury in me that would ignite my hair every time I had to sit down and write about it. This largely north-side problem was compounded when the great Honey 1 BBQ relocated to Bronzeville after ten underappreciated years in Bucktown, where the Adams family was hounded by condo-dwelling NIMBYs panicked by its sweet porky perfume....

If you’ve got a craving for tropical bass but can’t wait for CumbiaSazo‘s next party at Double Door a week from Saturday, clear your schedule for the night of Sunday, March 20. That’s when East Room hosts the latest Red Bull Music Academy event, headlined by Peruvian tropical bass duo Dengue Dengue Dengue. Since 2010 Lima-based producers Felipe Salmon and Rafael Pereira have cooked up sweltering, dub-heavy, psychedelic cuts with the hazy allure of a humid day (and without any of the clammy moisture)....

When you first walk into the American Writers Museum, you walk right into a timeline of American writers that spans more than 400 years. You take that long hallway to reach an open space often used for talks with authors debuting new books. Throughout each and every space, there’s something to learn—with great quotes from great writers like Octavia Butler lining the walls. “There was so much rich content there, in video and and other materials, to sit down and scope out a way to put it online, to take the curriculum pieces we had for schools and make them available for download, and to just make it as interactive and engaging as possible in the spirit of the exhibit that we’d put together,” Cranston says....

The Bardy Bunch Set in 1974, Stephen Garvey’s musical parody almost literally mashes up the Brady bunch and the Partridge family, locking them into mortal scenarios out of Shakespeare. Keith P. and Marcia B. have gone all Romeo and Juliet even as Laurie P. and Greg B. are backing into romance a la Beatrice and Benedick from Much Ado. Mike and Carol B. are advancing their careers using the Macbeth method....

The Impostors Theatre Company wraps up its inaugural season with Footholds, an anthology of five short plays tied together by one shared conceit: a stack of red construction paper used in various ways. While most local theaters produce a single show (oftentimes running longer than necessary), it’s delightful to see a variety of engaging vignettes written by Chicagoans. Maria Welser’s Refraction explores life’s meaning through the metaphor of the life span of a star, a unique take on our shared journey and the search for purpose....

If you ask Google to translate “Bonjintan” from Japanese into English, it will tell you the word means “ordinary person”—but there’s nothing ordinary about the leader of this international quartet. Akira Sakata, born in Hiroshima early in 1945, has had a dazzlingly varied career: he’s a marine biologist who lectures on water fleas and biodiversity; a former television comedian and media personality who once appeared in a Seiko watch commercial with Grace Jones; and a jazz saxophonist whose work encompasses smooth adaptations of Japanese folk and toe-to-toe slugfests with the likes of Peter Brötzmann....

Among them were two of the three feature films in this year’s festival. James C. and Melissa Boratyn’s Ginger follows a 23-year-old recent college graduate who, aside from dealing with career uncertainty and familial pressure to succeed, has recently been diagnosed with breast cancer. Sanghoon Lee’s Banana Season is the tale of the unique relationship between a little person and an MMA cage fighter. In addition to these heavier topics, there are lighthearted and comedic international selections....

When the word “academic” is applied to jazz, it’s not necessarily a compliment. But these three players, all of whom teach at universities, make music that could keep you at school till the sun comes up. The success of General Semantics, the debut album by Northern Illinois University’s Geof Bradfield (tenor and soprano saxophones, bass clarinet), DePaul University’s Dana Hall (drums), and UC Berkeley’s Ben Goldberg (B-flat and contra-alto clarinets), derives from the trio’s collective engagement with diverse stylistic fundamentals as well as their understanding of the connections between different eras of jazz....

There’s a Viagra Triangle-like quality to the Tronc-Gannett romance—whose latest turn is that they’ve called the whole thing off. But the other day, just when it looked like Tronc and Gannett would be walking out together, the deal fell apart. The Wall Street Journal explained that during the canoodling, Gannett shares fell 54 percent in value and two of its major lenders pulled out. And what now? With Gannett out of his life—at least for now—could Ferro, if only to allay boredom, try to consolidate both major Chicago dailies under his command?...

As election night unfolded—and the reality of Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s reelection became too obvious for even the most delusional of us to ignore—I had to fight the urge to drown my sorrows in copious quantities of red wine and reefer. Dowell reminded us that in politics as in basketball it takes both an “inside and outside” game to produce a winning team. It’s pretty obvious that we moved him to the left....

We chose this vintage gig poster because so many present-day concerts are being postponed or canceled in hopes of slowing the spread of COVID-19. Please support the staff of your local music venues if you can—the Reader is maintaining a list of fundraisers here. ARTIST: Ralph Graham (1901-1980) SHOW: Illinois Symphony Orchestra at the Great Northern Theatre (at Quincy and Dearborn), most Sundays in 1937 MORE INFO: This article about Ralph Graham describes his history as assistant director and in-house artist at the Brookfield Zoo....

What is it with brunch? What’s so special about pancakes and eggs that we’re willing to suffer the indignity of hour-long waits, often with hangovers or small children in tow? Why are we willing to pack cheek to jowl inside a freezing vestibule, bleary-eyed and undercaffeinated when, as my mother likes to say, we could’ve just eaten at home? Brunch is one of those odd cultural phenomena that defy explanation. There’s just something about a steaming mug of coffee, the mercy of a Bloody Mary, the cheerful din of brunching humanity; certain intangible qualities that simply can’t be reproduced at home....

Mike Sula Reuben, The Corned Beef Factory Used to be that if you wanted a full packer-cut brisket, complete with point and flat, for say corned beef, barbecue, or pot roast, you had to head down to Lake Street to Ex-Cel Corned Beef before 3 PM on weekdays. Ex-Cel was a holdover from the Fulton Market district’s fading blue-collar milieu, when it was a place people went to work rather than drop hundreds of dollars on dinner and drinks....

Brian Jackson/Sun-Times Media Rahm’s got the Chicago Firefighters Union behind him. It seems like only yesterday that Mayor Rahm—backed by his mayoral body guards, of course—was marching into firehouses to tell the rank and file he was cutting their pensions. In so many words, of course. And you can’t achieve that goal by gutting the ranks, and cutting their salaries and benefits. Moreover, in the matter of pensions—which the mayor has conveniently put off until after the election—Ryan remains confident that the mayor has backed off from his old hard-line stance....

Theatre Y presents the four András Visky plays that make up Stories of the Body on a set that looks like a bathroom—both a public one with urinals side by side on and a private one with a footed bathtub center stage. Designed by Luminaxis Studio, it’s an ideal locale for stories that plumb the depths of female experience: intimate to the point of unfamiliarity, walled with surfaces that reflect to various degrees of opacity (mirror, glass, tile), implying exterior dirt and interior excrement, offering opportunities to expel, rinse, cleanse, submerge, all within an enclosed acoustic chamber for expression and confession that, with the urinals, never releases its subjects from the tacit menace of masculine presence....

Liz Lauren A scene from the Goodman’s production of Two Trains Running This spring, the Goodman Theatre is paying tribute to the playwright August Wilson, who died ten years ago when he was just 60, with a citywide celebration, including discussions, symposia, readings of his poetry, and, most of all, performances or staged readings of all ten plays in his 20th Century Cycle, one for each decade of the century....

Despite what the yellow signs say, if you want your Chicago bike trip to be as pleasant as possible, I suggest you don’t “share the road” with drivers. I’m not saying you should be a jerk to motorists, but rather that you should consider opting out of riding on our city’s hectic, car-choked arterials in favor of peaceful low-traffic side streets. RELATED: READ ALL OF OUR BIKE WEEK COVERAGE...