This year Chicago seems to be hosting fewer extracurricular blues events during Blues Festival week than it has in the past. It’s too soon to decide that audiences have gotten complacent, though—and you can still find plenty of worthwhile shows. The city’s blues clubs kick into overdrive during the fest, of course (see the Reader‘s listings for more on them). But this weekend several spaces that don’t routinely host big blues concerts also get into the act—as do less publicized neighborhood venues, which do their best to make special occasions out of their shows....

Jason Blum is the Roger Corman of our time, an inventive and economical producer who manages to work on more than a dozen movies a year, which range from formulaic horror flicks (Paranormal Activity, Insidious) to subversive provocations (The Purge, Get Out) to auteur-driven projects like Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash and M. Night Shyamalan’s Split. This year promises a slate of interesting releases that includes remakes of Benji and Halloween (the latter directed by David Gordon Green), Spike Lee’s docudrama BlacKkKlansman, and the latest entry in the Purge series, by far the most political of the Blumhouse franchises....

The Back Room Deal features radio personality and longtime Reader political writer Ben Joravsky arguing local Chicago politics with Reader staff writer Maya Dukmasova. With sharp wit and stinging analysis, Joravsky and Dukmasova cut through the smoky haze of the elections to offer you a glimpse of the current Chicago races—ward-level and, of course, mayoral. Will these historic elections be determined in back-room deals, like so many in Chicago’s past? Let Ben and Maya talk you through it....

If nothing else, Just Getting Started (currently in commercial release) tells the world that writer-director Ron Shelton (Bull Durham, White Men Can’t Jump) enjoys being an old man. The film, an amiable and instantly forgettable comedy, offers an idealized picture of semiretirement, with sexagenarian and septuagenarian characters enjoying easygoing lives filled with sex, golf, and gambling. It takes place at an upscale gated community in Palm Springs, California, and for the first half hour, Shelton does little but bask in how nice it is to live there....

Let’s get the bad news out of the way first: Dogs are not welcome at the Chicago stop of the nationally touring Dog Film Festival. Other than that, the films cover a wide range. There are animated movies and live-action movies, documentaries and fiction, in English and subtitled; the only stipulation was that they be shorts. Hotchner found most of the entries online and then tracked down the filmmakers, many of whom had moved on from filmmaking....

I would not have survived long in the Mattachine Society. The organization’s own founders were ousted in its third year. Even five cisgender white men were considered too radical to run a homosexual group seeking respectability, especially one fearful of FBI infiltration. Although the society was founded in 1950 in order to declare homosexuals a cultural minority and became the first successful American homosexual rights organization, the leaders who overthrew the proud founders were determined to declare us a group just like everyone else in mainstream society....

Q: I’ve been dating a nice guy for a month or so. Sex is good, and we’re fairly compatible in other ways too. He told me he likes to wear diapers. He said he doesn’t want me to do it with him, but that every once in a while he likes to wear them because it makes him feel “safe.” He said that this odd behavior isn’t sexual for him, but I have trouble believing him....

Before Tyler Odom moved to Chicago this year, he had the wild idea to take bedroom pop’s fragile instrumentation and whispered vocals and mash them together with screamo’s bleating hollers and grenades of frisson. On his recent self-titled solo debut as Your Arms Are My Cocoon, Odom fuses those incongruous styles with pluck, charm, and irrepressible energy—it feels like he succeeds simply because he’s so sure he can. He made most of the album in his bedroom in Katy, Texas, and certain elements sound like they were recorded in a blanket fort; the busy patter of electronic percussion that races through “Clifford the Big Red Stab Wound” could be coming from a speaker buried under a pile of pillows....

Update: Sleigh Bells have canceled due to illness. After building a reputation as the world’s first great shred-pop standard-bearers—bolstered by hardcore-breakdown guitar riffs that sonically resemble something close to a New Year’s Eve glitter bomb—the duo of vocalist Alexis Krauss and guitarist Derek Miller went outside their element for their fourth full-length record, 2016’s Jessica Rabbit. The results were mixed. While Sleigh Bells’ early party songs were fun, simple, and complemented a great deal by Krauss and Miller’s leather-jacket-and-black-sunglasses cool, with Jessica Rabbit they struggled to find a middle ground between the allure of their first few albums and their desire to mature past their candy-coated sound; it often feels too stilted, and sometimes too meandering....

Why are there four T-shirt shops within a block of each other in Andersonville? Strolling north on Clark from Foster Avenue one soon understands the absurdity of that question because “T-shirt shops” have about as much in common with one another as “restaurants.” Strange Cargo (est. 1983) moved here from Wrigleyville in 2018 and specializes in pop culture graphic tees at $20 to $25 a pop. Across the street at Raygun (est....

Dear Heron, Are you one or several? You stand still as a statue or stride through the water, limbs sliding through liquid with scarce a ripple. You stalk through the limpid pond, aloof as a reptile, then strike with switchblade speed to emerge, beak snapping and eyes impassive, a living lump wriggling down your throat. I have stood breathless in the thrall of your strut, marveled at your shadowy reflection, observed you stirring less than the blades of grass ruffling in the breeze....

The Shape of Water, the latest fantasy from director Guillermo del Toro (Hellboy, Pan’s Labyrinth), is essentially a children’s movie for adults, inspiring a sense of wonder but also of passivity. It looks marvelous—one can easily get caught up in the lavish production design and inventive special effects, and the graceful camera movements carry one through the meticulously designed environments. The storytelling is fantastic and straightforward, like that of a fairy tale....

There’s something perfectly peak Wicker Park about a rigorously executed old-world Italian pastificio that offers zoodles in meat sauce along with casarecce, chiusoni, and lumache. I’ve lurked outside the Division Street storefront window of Tortello long enough to see those rare pasta shapes hand-formed by humans, but it seems the zucchini noodles are prepped in back, far away from the authenticity police but no more than a meatball’s throw from a hundred keto-crazed stroller moms....

When the entire run of Gilmore Girls was added to the Netflix roster back in September 2014, comedians Kevin T. Porter and Demi Adejuyigbe were just a couple of nobodies in a crowd at LA’s UCB Theatre. They met there during a taping of the movie-trivia podcast Doug Loves Movies and, looking for a project of their own, turned to the WB dramedy about a mother-daughter pair for inspiration. On the podcast Gilmore Guys, Porter, already a superfan of the show, became Adejuyigbe’s guide as he experienced the series for the first time....

The price of music has been in flux since it was first commodified on wax cylinders. Artists have rarely had much say in that price, though, or in how much of the money reaches them—and in some ways recorded music has never been worth less. As long as you have a stable Internet connection, you can hear anything from several vast, overlapping catalogs at any time. Streaming services have made countless hours of music available for monthly subscription fees that average around $10, and if you’re willing to listen to ads, it can all be free....

My first impression of Bixiga 70—which I’m a little embarrassed to say came just last month, almost ten years into their career—was something like, “Hey, it’s the Brazilian Antibalas.” “Some of us come from candomblé, others from jazz, reggae, dub, everything,” said Ferreira. “The whole idea of the band has been to take all these different elements that form us, from Africa and Brazil, and create a hybrid from them.”

Last week the Supreme Court issued a landmark unanimous decision that the Eighth Amendment’s protections against excessive fines apply to the states, not just to the federal government. The decision was hailed by many as a major blow to the practice of civil asset forfeiture—when law enforcement agencies permanently seize property or money tied to criminal activity. However, despite the importance of the decision, experts familiar with civil asset forfeiture in Illinois caution that it won’t necessarily change much about the unfairness of the practice....

Inspired by this unusually snowy Chicago winter, I recently set out to cross-country ski the entire 18.5 mile Lakefront Trail from north to south, unclipping and hiking where necessary, and stopping to check out public art and other sights along the way whenever I felt like it. After skirting Montrose Beach and heading west past the harbor, I turn south to take the snow-covered gravel road that leads along the shore towards the Waveland Clock Tower....

Last year I watched two childhood friends have a series of online debates over police brutality. One of my friends is a black police officer. The other, also black, has been very outspoken on the subject. For instance, that friend accused our police officer friend of having been “brainwashed,” and of doing “the white man’s work,” as he put it. Foley: As a kid my friends and I met a black juvenile officer that came and talked to us one day while we were playing basketball....

Comedy Central’s South Side isn’t interested in making north-siders—or any nonsouth-side Chicagoan, for that matter—laugh, but it’s sure to get plenty of kicks out of them anyway. South Side’s Englewood isn’t the Englewood in Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq or even the one shown on the local TV news. This Englewood still struggles with violence, but it also has a community of people who love each other, hate on each other, or “treat” each other, as south- and west-siders would say, and hustle nonstop....