Brett Schneider promises an evening of magic—card tricks, mind reading, and small-scale hypnotism—but what he delivers is something much richer and more satisfying. Working in a performance space configured so that the audience surrounds him on all sides, he pulls us in, using his art to first entertain us, then beguile us, and then unite us into a shared experience (I wanted just now to write “shared hallucination,” but part of me still wants, days after the show, to believe that Schneider’s evening of amazing illusions were real)....

Chicago drone-doom veterans Buried at Sea haven’t had much chance to enjoy the cult following they’ve developed since parting ways in the mid-aughts. The shows on their current west-coast tour are their first since 2011, when they played the Alehorn of Power festival—and at that point, it’d been nearly seven years since their previous gig. The hugeness and density of Migration make it sound thrilling and terrifying even today, which is saying a lot considering the exponential gains in prestige and popularity that doom metal has enjoyed during the past ten years....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Wednesday, February 1, 2017. Report: The racial wealth gap in Chicago is much higher than the U.S. average Wealth inequality between whites and blacks, Latinos, and Asians in Chicago is much higher than the national average, according to a new study from the Corporation for Enterprise Development. The median income for whites is $70,960 “compared with $56,373 for Asians, $41,188 for Latinos and $30,303 for blacks,” according to the Tribune....

Because you’re reading a beer column, you probably already know that in 2013 Temperance became the first craft brewery in Evanston’s history (the town was dry from 1858 till 1972). Before I started working on this post, I’d had a couple of Temperance beers, but I didn’t write about them—not when Temperance kegs started showing up in Chicago bars in October, and not when Temperance opened its tap room in December....

Early on Saturday, September 15, Chicago experimental musician Brett Naucke got home from the High Zero Festival to find he’d been robbed. The items stolen included an iMac and two hard drives that held an album he’d finished just days before. The product of nine months’ work, it was slated for release on the label run by synth manufacturer Make Noise—which will now put out a different and still forthcoming Naucke album, for obvious reasons....

Launched back in 1998, the European Union Film Festival has grown into one of the city’s very best cinematic events, the only serious rival in size and quality to the venerable Chicago International Film Festival. This year, through April 3, Gene Siskel Film Festival presents 64 new features from EU member nations, including Chicago premieres of new work by Daniel Auteuil (Fanny, Marius), Francois Ozon (Young & Beautiful), Paul Verhoeven (Tricked), Lukas Moodysson (We Are the Best!...

Dutch drummer Han Bennink, who turns 75 next month, has been an unrelenting creative force in jazz and improvised music since the early 60s. In 1964 he played on Eric Dolphy’s legendary final record, Last Date, and in ’67 he formed the Instant Composers Pool with pianist Misha Mengelberg (who died two weeks ago) and reedist Willem Breuker. He has an instantly recognizable sound—loud, chaotic, furiously swinging—and he’s applied it to hundreds of records....

Blog posts about rising LA R&B duo They. tend to reference the genre they label themselves with on some of their Soundcloud uploads—“grunge&b.”—but otherwise describe them in quite different ways. That reflects producer Dante Jones and singer Drew Love’s chameleonic songwriting history as much as it does their marketing: before teaming up, Love wrote with Jeremih, while Jones worked on projects for Nickelodeon and got a Grammy for his contributions to Kelly Clarkson’s “Mr....

Since he became an advocate for marijuana legalization more than a decade ago, Mason Tvert, now director of communications for the Marijuana Policy Project, says he’s been approached countless times by people who tell him he should stop using the word “marijuana” because of its racist origins within the context of America’s war on drugs. “Harry Anslinger is the most influential person no one has ever heard of,” says Johann Hari, author of Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (2015)....

There are a few reasons why midwesterners find it difficult to describe the region’s food. By Aimee Levitt Local chefs are using fresh, seasonal ingredients to class up classic comfort foods, from pasties to a dinner of meat and potatoes. By Julia Thiel Illinois’s dairy heritage has been resurrected by a former pencil pusher who just wanted healthy milk for his family. By Mike Sula Farmer Andy Hazzard and baker Ellen King conduct the great Midwestern Bread Experiment....

Clive Owen as a high school English teacher in Words and Pictures Like many Chicagoans, I’m eagerly looking forward to the David Bowie exhibit that opens at the Museum of Contemporary Art later this month. I’m also excited about the upcoming Doc Films series (copresented by the MCA) of movies featuring Bowie, which occupies the second Thursday-night slot on Doc’s fall calendar. Bowie’s records have always exhibited strong affinities with cinema....

The Pitchfork Music Festival has been around a dozen years—or a baker’s dozen, if you start with 2005’s Pitchfork-curated Intonation Music Festival. In that time it’s become one of the most renowned events of its kind in the U.S., in part because it insists on an aesthetic of its own rather than simply following trends on the contemporary festival circuit. But while Pitchfork doesn’t tend to book the same acts that make so many other big fests look similar every summer, it does have its own comfort zone....

Douglas Fairbanks as Robin Hood We’ve been remiss in failing to report on the summer screenings presented by the Silent Film Society of Chicago at the Pickwick Theatre in Park Ridge. The venerable programming organization has already shown the rare comedy It’s the Old Army Game (starring W.C. Fields and Louise Brooks), Fritz Lang’s Woman in the Moon, and Cecil B. DeMille’s The Whispering Chorus, but they still have three more screenings on the way....

The selections in this year’s Animation Show of Shows (curated, as always, by Ron Diamond) tend to be more amusing than inspired; my favorite works in the program provided me with momentary delight rather than lasting astonishment. The most representative piece may be Business Meeting, a pencil-drawn short from Brazil that delivers an absurdist send-up of corporate conferences. Running a little under two minutes, Business Meeting presents a distinctive style, serves up some laughs, makes its point, then promptly ends....

Don’t expect a media hotshot to ride into town and take over Sun-Times Media from Timothy Knight. In fact, Knight won’t be replaced at all. The CEO of parent company Wrapports LLC since 2011, Knight left Friday to become president of Northeast Ohio Media Group in Cleveland, his wife’s hometown. Now a trio of executives will run Wrapports’ businesses, according to the company. Jim Kirk, publisher and editor-in-chief of the Sun-Times, Paul Pham, senior vice president for business operations, and Sun-Times Network CEO Tim Landon will all report directly to board chair Michael Ferro....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Monday, March 27, 2017. There won’t be limits on campaign donations in upcoming governor’s race after Kennedy donation Businessman and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Chris Kennedy donated $250,100 to his own campaign fund, ending the limit on campaign donations for the 2018 Illinois gubernatorial race. If a candidate gives him- or herself more than $250,000 or an “outside independent expenditure group uses that amount of money to try to influence the outcome of an election,” the donation limit of $5,600 for individuals and $11,100 for unions and corporations is lifted in a statewide race, the Tribune reports....

Onibaba Yesterday, the University of Chicago’s Doc Films screened the Japanese cult item House, an “incredibly odd Japanese horror feature [that’s] like a Hello Kitty backpack stuffed with bloody human viscera,” writes J.R. Jones, quite accurately and, uh, poetically. (If you’ve never seen the film and missed Doc’s screening, the DVD is available via Criterion; you’ll understand pretty quickly what Jones is getting at there.) Japanese horror, often referred to simply as J-horror, has a long and rich history dating all the way back to the silent era....

Yesterday XXL magazine debuted its seventh-annual “Freshman cover” on BET’s weekday music video show 106 & Park, and in addition to profiling 12 buzzing rappers the issue could pass for a special about Chicago hip-hop. A third of the MCs who appear on the cover are local—Lil Bibby, Chance the Rapper, Lil Durk, and Vic Mensa—and they’ve all popped up in the Reader before. I first mentioned Lil Durk in my 2012 cover story on the relationship between local streetwear brands and rappers—Durk signed a deal with Def Jam in the middle of a major label gold rush aimed at scooping up new Chicago rappers earlier that year, and he’s occasionally appeared in my pieces since then....

The best of all things is something entirely outside your grasp: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. —Greek drunkard-god Silenus, quoted in Straight White Men by way of Friedrich Nietzsche And there beginneth the allegory: Jake and Drew are, of course, the white male faces of commerce and art, and Lee makes sure we understand how clubby they are. Long early stretches of SWM show them in unrestrained adolescent-regression mode, triggered by their return to the cozy family seat....

Any new example of the burgeoning peril to American mindhood is sure to make news. Monday’s Tribune carries an op-ed from CNN contributor S.E. Cupp, who is more concerned than she needs to be about a guide to “bias-free language” that until recently was posted on the University of New Hampshire website. It might be possible to criticize a guide of this nature without leaning on Orwell, but Cupp fails the test....