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Since Frownland (2007), director Ronald Bronstein’s divisive and darkly comic character study of a New York door-to-door salesman who alienates everyone he encounters, the best American independent films have tended to revolve around protagonists whose surly demeanor gets them relegated to the margins of society. Drew Tobia’s See You Next Tuesday (2013) deals with an impoverished, pregnant store clerk, the Safdie Brothers’ Heaven Knows What (2014) with destitute heroin addicts, and in both cases their revolting character traits are tempered by the wretched hands they’ve been dealt....

Shortly after the pandemic shut down the theaters, Fleetwood-Jourdain Theatre artistic director Timothy Edward Rhoze joined a Zoom meeting of more than 40 artists, all leaders of Evanston’s many arts organizations. “As artists, we have a pulpit to spread love to this community. I felt like it was time for us to stop operating out of a vacuum and start pooling our intellect, our ambitions, our talents,” he said. “I was sort of crying after the meeting, I was so moved by what Tim said....

In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I wrote one story for VICE in 2013. In Chicago “day drinking isn’t just tolerated, it’s downright encouraged,” VICE says. “One thing we’ve always appreciated about the city of Chicago is how acceptable it is to be drunk in public at all hours of the day. . . . This is Chicago and we have a God-given right to drink wherever and whenever we please....

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. See photo above What we’re reading:

Modernity and history comingle uneasily in downtown Springfield. State workers, lobbyists, and tourists pass along a patchwork quilt of ordinary paved roads and old-timey cobbled boulevards dotted with Subways, Starbucks, Abe Lincoln statues, and souvenir shops. The servants of the state go about the government’s business in mundane-looking office towers or under the silver dome of the capitol building, while visitors shuffle in and out of structures crafted to resemble the city from our favorite son’s pre-Great Emancipator days—including the Old State Capitol that’s now a museum of bygone legislation....

Third Eye Theatre Ensemble is offering a labor of love this weekend with its Chicago premiere production of Stitch, marketed as “An A Cappella Opera for 3 voices and 3 Sewing Machines.” Laboring in a tattered environment closer to Wozzeck’s than to Carmen’s, there’s no reprieve for these factory workers. But the piece, directed by Rose Freeman and conducted by Alexandra Enyart, is a dancing, acting, singing tour de force for the cast of two sopranos and a mezzo....

If you’ve lived in Chicago long enough, you knew Monday’s snowfall was coming. After just a few weeks of generous sunshine, manageable wind, and (more or less) reasonable temperatures, you knew Mother Nature was going to come back and say, “Don’t put away those Canada Goose jackets just yet.” But many Chicagoans went right out and took advantage of the April snowfall, sporting the attitude: “We’ll show you, Mother Nature, we’ll show you....

Sex work is not a monolithic culture of human trafficking and abuse. Conversations that break stigmas, explore empowerment, and encourage consent are a huge part of the adult industry. This isn’t to say that people don’t become involved in sex work because of unfortunate circumstances or that human trafficking isn’t an alarming concern—those fears are valid. But as a former sex worker and current artist, I know what it can be like to be in the adult industry in the public sphere....

Michael Gebert Pork soda display from Fresco 21 Until this weekend, I hadn’t attended Baconfest since 2009, when I gave a talk on bacon making (which owed liberally to Michael Ruhlman’s Charcuterie). Chicago’s annual salute to cured pork belly draws over 100 chefs, thousands of attendees over the course of three sessions, and raises tens of thousands of dollars for the Greater Chicago Food Depository. It also sells out in about 12 minutes, so when coorganizer/old pal Seth Zurer invited me to go inside the belly of the beast—that is, to be a judge for the Friday night session—I grabbed my older son and jumped at the chance....

Astrophysicist Carl Sagan once speculated that cannabis might be the first crop ever cultivated by human hands, leading to the invention of agriculture—which, in turn, led to the development of civilization itself. While it’s impossible to know definitively if cannabis was the very first cultivated plant, we do know it was among the first, with records of human use of the plant reaching back over 10,000 years. For millennia, cannabis and agriculture have been inextricably linked, with innovation and human ingenuity continually working towards a better way to grow....

[UPDATED] Despite a dispute over a contract that threatened to cancel this weekend’s shows, the Admiral Theater and Stormy Daniels rode the storm out and have agreed that the porn star’s run of shows in Chicago wouldn’t just be a one-night stand. The porn star walked out of her highly anticipated Thursday-night show at the Admiral Theatre early due to a contract dispute with the management of the northwest-side strip club....

The latest Cocktail Challenge, in which local bartenders challenge fellow bartenders with an ingredient of their choice. Enochs says his first attempt at the cocktail was “way too beefy—it felt like you were drinking tomato-beef soup.” It didn’t help that he doesn’t really like Bloody Marys in the first place. But once he adjusted the proportions, Enochs discovered that he’d created a drink he actually enjoyed. All it took was a little bone marrow....

Arthur Le Fol The Dø, moments before testing that engine’s bird-strike countermeasures If you pay any attention at all to bylines around here, you know I tend to write about metal. Even my beer column is, at least nominally, partly about metal. But if anything, that should lend more weight to my recommendation of Franco-Finnish electro-pop duo the Dø, right? If music this shiny, bouncy, and accessible can win over a head-banging heathen like me, it must be really special....

Ravenswood’s Fountainhead is one of the best craft beer and whiskey bars in the city, with dizzyingly long lists that are a pleasure to lose oneself in. When it was announced more than two years ago that its principals were to take over the former Jury’s in nearby North Center and open a cider-focused bar, hopes were widely pinned on the group taking the same careful and comprehensive approach to apple fermentation....

Time to plan the weekend. Here’s some of what we recommend: 1/8-1/31: “Seventy-Seven” at Galerie F (2381 N. Milwaukee) is a collection of new works by street artist Penny Pinch, each inspired by one of Chicago’s 77 community areas. Opening reception Fri 1/8, 6-10 PM.

Originally conceived as a play, Thoroughbreds (which is now playing in general release) still feels plenty theatrical. The developments are primarily internal, the action dialogue driven. Writer-director Cory Finley displays a nice use of the wide-screen frame to heighten the drama, exaggerating the emotional distance between characters or using negative space to draw attention to secrets left unspoken. It’s a handsome movie about awful people—the slender narrative revolves around the plotting of a murder, and the character positioned as the film’s voice of reason claims early on that she has no emotions....

This winter the University of Chicago Film Studies Center presents a series of programs celebrating the 50th anniversary of Canyon Cinema, the experimental-film distributor founded by filmmaker Bruce Baillie and still going strong in San Francisco. This Friday’s installment, “Decodings,” offers plenty of exciting stuff: Jodie Mack’s Point de Gaze (2012), a dazzling high-speed montage of the patterns in fine Belgian lacework; Naomi Uman’s Removed (1999), in which the figure of a woman has been scraped away from 16-millimeter footage of an old 1970s soft-core feature, just as her perspective has been overlooked in the original; and JoAnn Elam’s Lie Back and Enjoy It (1982), whose soundtrack consists of a woman interrogating a male filmmaker about the power relationship he creates when he trains his lens on her....

Based on true events, Twiceborn tells the story of Satoru Ichijo, a highly successful businessman who relinquishes everything to pursue his true, higher calling. The film begins in July 1991 with Ichijo lecturing to a massive crowd of more than 50,000 people in Tokyo Dome. The story then flashes back to scenes from his formative years, including the months during his senior year in college when Ichijo, a top scholar and athlete, begins receiving messages from the spiritual world....

This morning the North Coast Music Festival announced the lineup for its ninth year, headlined by self-described “future funk” outfit Jamiroquai. The British band played their first U.S. show since 2005 last month at Coachella, where they appeared on Friday’s bill a few notches below headliner the Weeknd. Jamiroquai booked a handful of stateside performances in support of their first album in nearly a decade (last year’s Automation), and their timing is great: boogie, modern funk, and other postdisco subgenres that overlap with Jamiroquai’s sound have recently emerged as vital underground forces on an international scale....