On Thursday, November 29, a group of music venue owners who’d just organized themselves as the Chicago Independent Venue League (CIVL) held a press conference to announce their opposition to Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s fast-tracking of Lincoln Yards, a hugely ambitious mixed-use development along the North Branch of the Chicago River. The members of CIVL say the project won’t just make the city’s homegrown music economy less competitive—it also has the potential to sink it completely....

Henry Godinez isn’t the Don Quixote type. That is, he doesn’t much resemble the popular image of that famously misguided knight errant, propagated by everybody from Daumier and Doré to Dali and Picasso. Based, I guess, on a brief description that appears at the beginning of Miguel de Cervantes’s vast 400-year-old comic novel The Adventures of Don Quixote, we’ve come to picture the man from La Mancha as your basic long drink of water....

Natalie Chami (aka TALsounds) and Whitney Johnson (aka Matchess) have been pillars of the city’s avant-garde electronic music scene for years, crafting elegantly droning ambient music on their own and engaging in thoughtful collaborations with other local artists. (Chami is also one-third of impressively far-out trio Good Willsmith, and Johnson has collaborated with the likes of Tortoise, Circuit des Yeux, and Bitchin Bajas.) Over the past few years, they’ve periodically joined forces onstage as the duo Damiana, and they’ve stolen pretty much every show Gossip Wolf has seen them play—in 2019, they opened for Meg Baird and Mary Lattimore at the Hideout and for Thou with Emma Ruth Rundle at Subterranean, and they were the best set both nights....

Just south of the Loop and along the east bank of the Chicago River, there’s a sprawling parcel of land overgrown with trees, wildflowers, and thistles. Rabbits, turtles, and even coyotes hide in the underbrush. For a minute you forget you’re in the city—until you see the foliage is masking slabs of crumbling concrete, protruding rusty pipes, broken glass, reservoirs of fetid trash, discarded clothing, liquor bottles, and beer cans....

There’s an overpass hill that arches Lake Shore Drive over Foster Avenue where we could make camp and inflate the beach ball and spread out our snacks. It’s a space I’ve walked and driven by hundreds of times without a glance or a thought, but my four-year-old daughter Lena and I settle in. She runs for miles across the hill, spending hours picking through pinecones and leaves, and generally, blessedly, having no idea what is going on in the world....

Painted banners hang long and low from the rafters of the Pulaski Park Field House, and when the music begins with a noise like a siren, the dancers flicker in and out of view through them, as animals in a thicket or words obscured by censorship bars. They are jointed and joined, mechanical and organic, as they emerge and retreat from view, in groupings that create dependencies through the tensions of push and pull that pulse within and beyond the self....

Kane Quilos and Patryck Kowalick met on Tinder, and are not ashamed to admit it. They had a low-key proposal filled with lots of giggles at their favorite Mexican restaurant. When planning the wedding, the hardest part was trying to whittle down the guest list to fit their budget. Other than that, the lead-up to their May 16 wedding date was fun and easy. But as gatherings of a certain size started to be discouraged and restrictions on travel threatened a large portion of guests flying in from the Philippines and from other cities across the U....

Wyatt Waddell dropped the remarkable new single “Fight!” on Wednesday, June 3, and it vibrates with the grief, rage, and revolutionary purpose that millions of Americans have been demonstrating since the killing of George Floyd. “This song is me looking at what’s happening and what I’d tell the people protesting,” says the local singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist. Waddell recorded the track—with its pumping funk instrumentation and a roof-raising choir of his multitracked vocals—alone in a single day....

Sarah Shook and Kelly Willis are a generation apart in age, but listening to each songwriter’s new album in succession prove that breakups, kiss-offs, and immediate consolation are timeless themes in country music. Just about every jacked-up song on Shook’s recently released second album, Years (Bloodshot), addresses good-for-nothings that the singer has either dumped or deems unworthy of her time. On the opener “Good as Gold,” she admits she’s afraid of losing, then quickly adds, “Not afraid of losing you”—sticking with a lover who doesn’t treat her well would cost her much more....

The Museum of Contemporary Art’s performance series has long been noted for breaking down barriers between disciplines. But reimagining what performance means in a pandemic presented its own challenges. This fall, two pieces—Last Audience: a performance manual, created by Yanira Castro and her ensemble, a canary torsi, and Chapter & Verse: The Gospel of James Baldwin by musician Meshell Ndegeocello and a team of collaborators—give audiences a measure of control and community in a time of chaos and quarantine....

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. Knives Out What we’re making:

Glaswegian Tracyanne Campbell understandably retreated from playing music after her best friend and longtime bandmate in Camera Obscura Carey Lander died from bone cancer in 2015 at the age of 33. The band has been on hiatus ever since, and it’s heartening to see Campbell reemerge on a new project with Bristol singer-songwriter and fellow pop auteur Danny Coughlan (who has performed under the name Crybaby). On their debut album, Tracyanne & Danny (Merge), which features crystalline production from veteran Britpop master Edwyn Collins, Campbell’s honeyed voice is as distinct and indelible as ever, projecting a blend of classic 60s girl-group sound and 50s dream-pop through a modern, Britpop filter....

German filmmakers have, of late, been revisiting the 20th century, exploring their nation’s tortured record under the Nazis and, later, Communism. On the heels of his fine two previous features, Barbara (2012), about an East Berlin dissident physician’s banishment to the provinces, and Phoenix (2014), in which a Jewish Holocaust concentration camp survivor, newly remodeled by plastic surgery, returns to Berlin to confront the lover who informed on her, writer-director Christian Petzold turns his gaze to France under Germany’s wartime occupation....

Aztec deities. Sistine Chapel replicas. Ancient mulberry trees. Ground Michelle Obama probably walked on. These are the elements that await within the latest adventures proffered by Chicago Children’s Theatre. Let it be said that if the CDC were to visit CCT, they’d approve of the 15-year-old company’s latest three productions. All are wholly outdoors and all will spur kids and their families to explore worlds completely inaccessible via computer screens. They are also marvelously engaging, no matter your chronological age....

For a journalistic lifer, there are various triumphs that can help compensate for the lousy wages and precarious existence of a newspaper writer. The cusser was Garry “Big Mac” McCarthy, who looks like he’s gearing up to run against Mayor Rahm in 2019. A couple of days before the event, Sun-Times reporter Fran Spielman interviewed McCarthy about SEIU’s protest. “If I leave here, I will say, ‘I leave here because I want to make my m******** money....

Q: Why aren’t there flea collars for people? I see ads for all kinds of products to protect pets from fleas and ticks, and nasty tick-borne diseases are becoming more common. I’m tired of having to strip and do an extensive tick check after every walk in the woods. —Bill Costa A: The good news on the prophylactic front here, Bill, is that, particularly in developed countries, modern hygiene has rendered fleas pretty much a medical nonissue....

On Friday, Mayor Lightfoot held a press conference to pat herself on the back for Chicago’s graduation rate. So in honor of Labor Day, allow me to give credit to the people who actually had something to do with whatever successes CPS can claim—the teachers, principals, teachers’ aides, coaches, clerks, lunchroom supervisors, janitors, and anyone else who actually, you know, does the labor. When it comes to school myths in Chicago, the narrative is positively biblical, taken straight from the Book of Genesis....

These days, record nerds seem keen to categorize the sounds of the past in newly minted genres such as “proto-metal,” “acid folk,” and “pastoral prog.” The terminally unhip Genesis—and especially their groundbreaking 1973 classic, Selling England by the Pound—might fit into any of these categories. No matter how anyone describes it, the album is one of the finest, most sophisticated rock records of that decade, with the heaviest vibes; I still find myself exploring its many layers far more often than I give the same treatment to Dark Side of the Moon or Who’s Next....

On their bruising second album, Sunwatchers II (Trouble in Mind), New York instrumental quartet Sunwatchers further refine their flinty collision of scorching free jazz and numbing proto-punk. Yet while the combo’s ethos is guided by influences such as the Stooges blowout “LA Blues” and the acidic skronk of guitarist Sonny Sharrock, there’s more to their game than pure aggression. Like a needling knottiness to the licks of Jim McHugh, who boogies down on the opening track, “Nose Beers,” with an electric phin—a Thai lute—suggesting a distortion-curdled analogue to the riffing of Saharan rockers Tinariwen....

Rich Hein/Sun-Times Media Nice building—but it’s no toilet paper. On behalf of all the movers and shakers in this town, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank the public school children of Chicago for their generosity in making this a banner year for Willis Tower and other downtown properties. In particular, I’m thanking the kiddies for the millions in property tax dollars that would have otherwise gone to the schools but instead went to help pay for refurbishing Willis Tower as part of the deal in which United Airlines moved its headquarters there....