Megadeth The festival you’ve all been waiting for kicks off this weekend—Warped Tour! Kidding, kidding, I meant to say the Pitchfork Music Festival (be sure to read our prefest coverage). But if you want to check out the traveling punk minimall head to First Midwest Bank Amphitheatre on Saturday. “The thing about guitarist Matt Pulos and drummer Evan Laffer—ahead-of-the-curve 19-year-olds from Agoura Hills, California, who play together as Dub Thompson—is that they can’t keep their genres in their pants,” writes Kevin Warwick....

It was high noon in late June in Chinatown on the first really swampy day of the summer. There were a few customers at Lao Sze Chuan. There was nobody in the new Korean barbecue joint except three fat, sweaty white guys. And who the hell could even think of eating in any of the dozen or so hot-pot joints on a day like that? “The method of manipulating ice cream on a cold surface had been around for a long time....

On a crisp morning in early November, attorney Dan Herbert, dressed in a blue suit and red tie, a thick, worn manila folder in hand and a razor nick drying on his chin, strides up the steps of the Leighton Criminal Courthouse on the corner of 26th and California. Inside, his client Jason Van Dyke—who was caught on video shooting 17-year-old Laquan McDonald 16 times—stands awkwardly in line for the metal detector, his aging father by his side....

Last Thursday, Tom Cruise made a surprise appearance at Showplace ICON theaters for a preview screening of his latest blockbuster, Edge of Tomorrow. When a huge star like that walks into a theater full of fans, there’s a sort of convulsion as people shriek and leap to their feet; it’s pretty exciting even if you don’t share in the hysteria. Cruise gave a little spiel for the movie, posed for a photograph with the whole audience standing behind him, and soon split....

Drew Reynolds courtesy of PMA PR Pinback The deluge of bands playing a classic album in its entirety reached its saturation point at last weekend’s Riot Fest when ten bands did that very thing. It’s easy to dismiss these kinds of performances for indulging in nostalgia, but I can appreciate them for the way they challenge our beloved memories of a specific album. The musicians performing an old record in full today have since changed, and seeing, say, Dexter Holland sing every song off Smash a couple decades and several dye jobs later can force you to reexamine how your own tastes and attitudes have evolved instead of pining for a bygone era....

First produced last fall at the Free Street Storyfront space in Back of the Yards, this remarkable revival chronicles, in a series of short, sweet scenes and heartfelt monologues, the loves and likes of various Chicago Chicanos: an uncloseted gay man who defies his father’s homophobia, a daring tagger yearning for his place in history, a teenager at once amused and appalled by the preparations for her quinceañera (the most humiliating moment must be when her abuela insists she enhance the bustline of her dress with Perdue frozen chicken breast fillets), and a late-middle-aged father coping with alcoholism and anger issues....

In 2014 singer and pianist Norah Jones shared the Kennedy Center stage with legendary saxophonist Wayne Shorter and drummer Brian Blade—both of whom played on her first couple of albums—for an event celebrating the 75th anniversary of her label, Blue Note, later telling writer Nate Chinen of the New York Times that she wanted those jazz veterans on her next record. Sure enough, they (along with Shorter quartet bassist John Patitucci) both turned up on last year’s Day Breaks, fitting in beautifully on a trio of tracks, including a version of Duke Ellington’s gorgeous “Fleurette Africaine” where Shorter’s soprano lines weave profoundly through gentle grooves, imparting a deep sonic wisdom....

Is Donald Trump willing to go back to being a birther? Though it cost Trump nothing to indulge the birthers year after year, others paid a price. The martyr of the birther movement was Terry Lakin, an army colonel court-martialed in 2010 and sentenced to six months in prison for refusing to report for duty in Afghanistan. Lakin held that the order was unconstitutional, in that it was authorized by an “illegitimate” president....

It’s shaping up to be a busy year for Chicago Cinema Society, the local programming organization that’s committed to screening rare and exotic genre films. Tonight and tomorrow at the Davis Theater at 11:55 PM, the group presents the local premiere of Kuso, the first film directed by noted musician Flying Lotus. CCS also has plans to screen work at the Nightingale Cinema and the soon-to-reopen Chicago Filmmakers in the near future....

Three years ago my wife and I rented an old bungalow in Avondale, and when we moved in, we discovered the street was lousy with rabbits—the eastern cottontail, to be exact, one of the most common species in the U.S. On one side of our house lay a weedy area that the rabbits used for cover, and on the other side stood a grassy open plot that they treated as their personal country club....

Tokyo-bred psych band Kikagaku Moyo have developed their music while focusing on a different aspect of the genre on each album. They started by exploring folksy strains on their 2013 self-titled first record, before engaging with flower-power bounce on Forest of Lost Children the following year. In 2016, they took a laid-back stance on House in the Tall Grass, and on their upcoming Masana Temples, due out on Guruguru Brain in October, they’ve gone relatively slick....

QI am a gay man and have been in a relationship with my GGG boyfriend for more than three years. We are in our early 20s and have a good sex life. I just discovered that he has been engaging in what can only be described as cyber infidelity. He had a secret e-mail account, posted on Craigslist M4M, and also had an Adam4Adam account. About once a week, while I was at work in the evenings, he would exchange photos and engage in conversations with other men....

Pumpkin pie became Illinois’s state pie this summer when, in acknowledgment of the Land of Lincoln’s status as the country’s top pumpkin producer, Governor Bruce Rauner signed a bill giving the dessert that official designation. It now shares equal billing with the state’s official fruit (the Goldrush apple) and snack food (popcorn). The gourd’s ground zero is downstate Morton, a town about ten miles southeast of Peoria. Morton—proclaimed “pumpkin capital of the world” in 1978 by a previous Republican governor—produces more than 80 percent of the world’s canned pumpkin....

ABC Marcus is the most boring man alive—but Clare don’t care! I’m about halfway through I Didn’t Come Here to Make Friends, a memoir and shoo-in for the Pulitzer by Bachelor villain and season 16 “winner” Courtney Robertson (cowritten by an actual writer person). It’s full of enlightening tidbits, for instance that a psychologist—the same one who administers a 150 question personality test during an advanced stage of the audition process—always travels with the show and “is a permanent fixture on set....

2956 S. Wallace, 773-742-8782 Far be it from me to tell Diane von Furstenberg how to design a dress, but the purple silk number I got for like six bucks at a thrift store a few months ago just didn’t work for me. It was open in the front and drapey enough that it covered everything, but a gust of wind was a guaranteed ticket to titty town; inadvertently exposing my breasts in public is a thing I try to avoid....

Anyone who caught Chance the Rapper‘s weekend-closing headlining set at this summer’s Pitchfork Music Festival also witnessed its heavy dose of contemporary gospel music, specifically due to the appearance of Kirk Franklin and a choir of backup singers. The biblical push shows no sign of slowing down, as evidenced by Chance’s appearance on BJ the Chicago Kid’s recent single, “Church.” The track dropped on Fake Shore Drive on Saturday and it’s the latest preview of BJ’s forthcoming album, In My Mind....

It takes a certain brazenness to attempt maximalist rap as an underdog, and Chicago rapper-producer Ibn Inglor has it in spades. Last year’s self-released Honegloria is painted from the same palette Kanye’s been using for his recent work: spartan synths play yawning melodies as big as canyons, horn samples sound like they’re calling gladiators to battle, and booming percussion makes as much of an indent when the drums go quiet as when they’re at full tilt....

Laura Collins, Donald Trump Mocking a Disabled Reporter, 2017 “My intent with the triptych—which is based on fractured stills from video footage of the president-elect imitating Serge Kovaleski, a New York Times reporter who has arthrogryposis—is to force the viewing public to look again at a moment in our recent history that is incredibly shameful. When faced with discomfort, we naturally squirm and cope with these feelings by avoiding, ignoring, or denying them....

Meghan Daum is the author of one new(ish) essay collection, The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion, and the editor of another, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids, which she’ll be discussing with the writer Jac Jemc at the Chicago Humanities Festival on November 7. Recently she took some time to chat on the phone about Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed from New York, where she’s a professor in the MFA creative writing program at Columbia University’s School of the Arts....

Dwight Yoakam has dabbled in bluegrass now and again over the years—which is yet another aside in a career already filled with flourishes that buck Nashville orthodoxy. Back in the 90s he sang a duet with Ralph Stanley, while on his rock-solid 2015 album Second Hand Heart (Reprise) he included a spirited version of the folk song “Man of Constant Sorrow,” which was popularized by the Stanley Brothers in the 50s....