“Once one of my door guys said, ‘The greatest thing about the Mutiny is that anyone can play here,'” says Mutiny owner Ed Mroz. “‘The worst thing about the Mutiny is that anyone can play here.'” “I remember at a (Lone) Wolf & Cub show there, someone was just tearing track lighting down from the ceiling,” says artist and musician Ryan Duggan. Destroying part or all of the Mutiny’s ceiling became something of a tradition—at a show there I played with the Catburglars more than a decade ago, in the middle of a song I saw someone pull down a drop-ceiling tile and take a bite out of it....

Chandler West/For Sun-Times Media Mayor Emanuel announces plans for Obama College Prep. The mayor’s office has declined to answer questions about the selection of the Near North Side as the site for the school. “Rahm Emanuel is no friend of democracy,” historian Rick Perlstein wrote in Rolling Stone in 2012. The mayor was “obsessed with finding ways to expand his executive power” and worked “underhandedly and opaquely,” Perlstein charged....

The murder of Eric Garner at the hands of New York City police officer last July became one of the most widely covered cases of police brutality in the United States. As coverage of the case continued, interested readers were likely to learn more about the incident via the Associated Press, which published a story last December with the headline, “Police: Chokehold Victim Eric Garner Complicit In Own Death.” Objectivity as a journalistic ideal has its origins in the 19th century, when newspapers began to worry that they would alienate potential readers by aligning themselves with particular political viewpoints....

Apart from a worn-out copy of Dumpster Decorating for Dummies, Gossip Wolf has little use for books. But last year local writer Maryse Meijer carved out an exception to that rule with the short-story collection Heartbreaker, which brims with oddly relatable (and often horny) weirdos seeking connection in an unsympathetic world—including an arsonist who falls in love with his own fires. Songwriter Kenny Childers of Bloomington alt-rockers Gentleman Caller was similarly impressed—he says he read one story “50 times in a row”—and he and his band have since recorded a cycle of response songs called No One’s Daughter....

Jordan Seavey’s one-act, making its Chicago debut at Pride Films and Plays, tells, in fits and starts, the story of a relationship over a five-year period. The Writer (Niko Kourtis) and the Academic (Nelson A. Rodriguez) are gay, thirtysomething Brooklynites who fall in love fast and are quickly confronted with the challenges of monogamy and sharing their lives with a partner. The story isn’t told chronologically, and the transitions seem intentionally jarring as we see glimpses of the end, beginning, and middle of their relationship as well as its aftermath....

Seth Perlman / AP Photos Bruce Rauner, the Republican candidate for governor, has invested in for-profit schools accused of fraud. UPDATE: This post has been updated to include a quote from Thomas Zimmerman, lead attorney for the students in a class action lawsuit against the Illinois School of Health Careers and ForeFront Education. It’s a powerful statement. But as a longtime venture capitalist and investor, Rauner hasn’t always put his money where his ideals are....

Two local independent-film nonprofits, IFP Chicago and Full Spectrum Features (FSF), are partnering on a new initiative, Illinois Film Tour (IFT), with the intention of supporting diverse filmmakers and providing resources to underserved communities across the state. Funded by a $10,000 Multiplier grant from Illinois Humanities (IH), IFT enters a one-year pilot phase this spring, with Nicole Bernardi-Reis and Eugene Sun Park—president of the board of directors at IFP and the founder of FSF, respectively—cocurating the project....

Lala Lala were the first band I saw after I moved to Chicago in 2015. I was 18 and nervous, camouflaged under the low ceiling of Humboldt Park basement venue Pinky Swear in what I hoped was the universal cool-kid uniform, right down to the scuffed low-top Dr. Martens and can of PBR. In the abrasive guitar and intricately coded autobiographical lyrics of Lala Lala front woman Lillie West, I found a pocket of the Chicago underground rock scene that I could see myself in—I’ve been a fan ever since....

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s prestigious Mead Composer-in-Residence for the longest term so far (from 1997 to 2006, under both Daniel Barenboim and Pierre Boulez), Augusta Read Thomas has been an indefatigable force in new music in Chicago as a composer, educator, and curator. Since 2010 she’s been a professor of music composition at the University of Chicago, and few living composers have had their work performed as often. Her role behind the scenes was amplified last year when she spearheaded and cocurated the massive Ear Taxi Festival, an unprecedented multiday event that enlisted the participation of just about every extant new-music ensemble and composer that’s ever lived here....

Michael Gebert You drink the stuff on top, pigs eat the grain it came from—a win-win. You make beer. From grain. You think, what to do with the grain after it’s been boiled for a while? Hey, don’t pigs eat grain? Yes, they do, as do other farm animals. And so brewers have been giving brewery waste products, nice and mushy like Irish oatmeal, to farmers since, oh, Russell Crowe was building an ark or something....

UK alt-pop group the XX have built an empire out of monochromatic, minimalist movements. Their first two albums, 2009’s XX and 2012’s Coexist, both were seemingly capable of moving a mountain with the slightest of nudges, and they so successfully project a sense of intimacy that they’ve almost antithetically become a phenomenon that packs thousands into theaters. On January’s I See You (Young Turks) the XX augment their sound to fit bigger stages in the same way they’ve done everything else—subtly and skillfully....

Food Patriots Rogue chickens on the loose in Northbrook When Jeff and Jennifer Spitz’s son got sick from eating contaminated processed chicken, the first thing they did was spend more than a month growing increasingly frustrated and scared as he fought the antibiotic-resistant bug the chicken had given him. My son Sam went out to lunch with his friends after school, when he was in high school, and he got a chicken Caesar salad, thinking he was doing the healthy thing....

You know that special item that makes strangers approach you in the street? No, I’m not talking about a baby or a puppy—nothing whose poop you have to clean up. This is something that requires a lot less work. Bucketfeet cofounders Aaron Firestein and Raaja Nemani first hatched their concept after Firestein designed a pair of artsy sneakers for Nemani during their backpacking days in Argentina. When Nemani’s shoes kept turning heads, he decided to start a business with Firestein that would allow other artists to get their designs out on the street....

This show is part of what Carl Weathersby is calling his “I’m Back Again” tour. That said, the bluesman hasn’t really been absent—he’s recently been heard and seen as part of Pierre Lacocque’s Mississippi Heat. All the same, considering that his last album under his own name, I’m Still Standing Here, was released eight years ago, this could be viewed as something of a comeback. Like several blues performers active since the 70s, Weathersby shows the influence of Albert King—during the latter’s years on the Stax label, he had a way of mixing straight blues with soulish rhythms that seems to have affected everybody from Son Seals on down the line....

Musicals are notoriously expensive to produce, especially shows with large casts and a decent-size live orchestra. Joe Kinosian and Kellen Blair’s two-person murder-mystery musical (performed sans orchestra—the actors accompany themselves) is tailor-made for theaters on a budget. (And who isn’t?) Which may be one reason the show, after premiering in 2011 at Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, has gone on to be produced around the world, in both English and in translation (Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean)....

There is something delightfully and absurdly random about Flight Club Darts Chicago, as though all the planning for it took place over the course of a long, lazy, mildly intoxicated afternoon in a pub and, in the interest of fairness, everyone got to contribute one element that would make them happy. I imagine it went something like this: “And fancy cocktails with fanciful names!” “Let’s do this!” You could also admire the decor, which does indeed feature lots of china horses and wallpaper with hookah-smoking sloths (and gin-swigging raccoons and mandolin-strumming squirrels) and also hanging ferns, portraits that look like they were lifted from the Haunted Mansion at Disney World, and 18th-century etchings of dejected poets and their starving families....

The first reports, on February 19, that the Harris Theater for Music and Dance had been shut down by a fire got a gut reaction from me. So the idea of a fire there is alarming. Also canceled, but rescheduled: Chicago Opera Theater’s staging of Duke Ellington’s “street opera,” Queenie Pie, which was to begin its second weekend of performances February 21 but will instead run March 19, 20, and 23, and Music of the Baroque’s “Handel & Bach—Italian Style,” now set for April 21....

Since the election of Donald Trump, Ohio has served as a sort of political Rorschach test. Depending on the ideology or affiliation, some squint and see the state as the avatar of humble, plain-speaking “Real America.” Others view it as a downtrodden place that embraced Trumpism after being abandoned by Hillary Clinton and the Democrats. Then there are those who see a state of racist white people angry about the crumbling foundation of white supremacy....

A brooding romantic in the tradition of Nicholas Ray and Francois Truffaut, Scottish director David Mackenzie (Young Adam, Mister Foe) would seem ill suited for a realistic prison drama. His films are rooted in a sense of liberty: his characters behave unpredictably, often changing the course of their lives on a whim, and the choreographic camera movements and highly physical performances of his actors evoke a world brimming with possibility. One can easily imagine a prison film by Mackenzie being overwrought or unconvincing, yet Starred Up, while entirely characteristic, says a good deal about what it means to live behind bars....

As with much of her education work, Kaba told individual women’s stories Thursday night to build an argument about how the state criminalizes women (especially poor, black, and/or transgender women) for retaliating against domestic and sexual violence. It all began, she said, with the case of Celia, a woman enslaved in Missouri in the 1850s. Celia’s story “grounds the work that I do,” she said. Love, an African-American transgender woman, spent nearly four years in pretrial detention on attempted-murder charges after she ran over a member of a group of male attackers with her car....