Milo Goes to College Last night I went to the Vic to catch a screening of Filmage, a documentary about the legacy of the Descendents. I’ve loved the Descendents since I was little, and have always been hugely inspired by their music, ethos, and attitude, and seeing the film last night made all those feelings rush back—certain live shots of the band destroying tiny venues in the 80s actually gave me goosebumps....

Expresso 2222 I spent a chunk of the past weekend watching some of the World Cup, sleepily taking in long stretches of dribbling and passing punctuated by dramatic and improbable goals (poor Greece, I was rooting for them). In the spirit of the World Cup taking place in Brazil, I’ve been spending more time revisiting some older Brazilian music. For today’s 12 O’Clock Track I’m going with Gilberto Gil’s “Back in Bahia,” the second track off the singer-songwriter-guitarist’s 1972 album Expresso 2222....

Monique Burrell had just turned 16 when Jay Z pulled her up on stage for the first time. While watching Trey Songz open the concert at the United Center, she said to herself, “One day that’s going to be me on that stage.” She had no idea how quickly she’d be right. “I kid you not——right when I said that, I felt this indescribable energy,” she says. “I cannot put it into words....

In his long-running duo Arborea, guitarist Buck Curran skillfully spun lines of gossamer beauty and tenderness into a sparkling blanket under the sweet cooing of his musical collaborator and then-wife, Shanti Deschaine, occasionally descending into meditative treacle. Since he began making solo records a couple of years ago, his liquid fluency has taken a more rhapsodic direction. He’s achieved a new depth with his recent Morning Haikus, Afternoon Ragas (ESP-Disk/Obsolete), on which his delicate fingerstyle playing emphasizes lyric generosity over flashy technique....

With the 20th pick in the NFL draft, the Chicago Bears selected Kyle Long, offensive guard, Oregon—and the collective response from Bears fans was, “The fuck?” To be fair, Long’s story didn’t precede him. He started his collegiate career playing baseball for Florida State, piddled around in community college before deciding to switch to football, and played just one season at the FBS level for the Oregon Ducks, a team at a school most people east of the Mississippi are more or less clueless about....

When I first saw chef Jason Vincent he was jiggling his daughter’s child seat and talking about duck tongues. It was 2011, and he was featured in our chefs’ challenge, Key Ingredient, the video for which showed him minding his baby while creating a sandwich that showcased the avian body part in question. As he worked he called on the kind of ingredients that had already made his Pilsen restaurant, Nightwood, acclaimed: fermented foie gras, deep-fried Meyer lemons, an egg poached in duck fat....

Thirteen years ago Roger Ebert made an argument for making things up—one I’ve wrestled with ever since. But who is the “we” doing the asking? Given that standard, “JFK” is a masterpiece. In 2011, after writing out careful instructions for his brain to be harvested and studied, Duerson committed suicide by shooting himself in the heart. His instructions were carried out and pathologists found his brain was riddled with CTE. “People go to movies not to digest information and data but to have an emotional experience,” Concussion’s director, Peter Landesman, told the Times....

On March 26, 2014, FBI agents raided California state senator Leland Yee’s home and offices in what would become, according to the Los Angeles Times, one of the biggest public corruption scandals in San Francisco history. Arrested as part of a five-year investigation targeting the flamboyant gangster Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow, Senator Yee admitted in a plea deal to racketeering and accepting quid pro quo deals. For playwright Lauren Yee, the case hit close to home: Her father, Larry Yee, was an enthusiastic supporter of the politician, even volunteering for the senator’s secretary of state run....

Dulse, a type of seaweed that grows in the northern Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, is lauded as a health food that, according to some, tastes remarkably similar to bacon. Chef Ben Lustbader of Giant, challenged by Publican Anker‘s A.J. Walker to create a dish with the seaweed, was skeptical. “People call it the bacon of the sea,” he says. “I don’t really think it tastes a whole lot like bacon. One of my cooks described the flavor as malty, which seemed a little more on point to me....

Filmmakers who try to replicate The Godfather do so at their own risk. Every few years, during Oscar season, one of the big studios will come along with a well- upholstered period gangster epic—Road to Perdition (2002), American Gangster (2007), Legend (2015)—but none of them ever resonates socially the way the first two Godfather movies did during the institutional corruption of the Watergate era. Live by Night, which writer-director Ben Affleck has adapted from a novel by Dennis Lehane, takes a stab in this direction by portraying the hero, an Irish rumrunner who flees Boston and sets up a new operation in Tampa, as a sort of pre- multicultural man, finding common cause with the local oppressed blacks and immigrant Cubans....

The titular daughters of Savanna Rae’s one-woman show—Scathach, Uathach, Deirdre, and Queen Medb—all appear in the Ulster Cycle, a collection of wild, violent, sexy, fascinating folktales set in a decidedly pagan Ireland that were transmitted orally for generations before they were written down—and modified—by medieval monks. Set during the reign of a capricious, hotheaded King Conchobar mac Nessa (circa the first century CE), the tales describe an intensely tribal warrior culture in which heroes—of which Cú Chulainn is the best known—clash constantly over land, livestock, and honor....

Julia Thiel Toby Maloney adds a dash of Angostura bitters to a Tradewinds cocktail. “If you’re a champion you should drink this in like two minutes, tops,” Violet Hour mixologist Andrew Mackey says. He’s referring to the Blushing Lady, a cocktail he’s created for the bar’s spring menu (Plymouth gin, lemon juice, grenadine, orange marmalade syrup, fig bitters, and egg white—a take on the Maiden’s Blush). It’s a Thursday afternoon in mid-March, and the Violet Hour’s 20-odd bartenders and servers have assembled to taste and discuss new additions to the menu....

Chicago Filmmakers presents a compilation of 16mm and 8mm short films by Stuart Sherman, a multitalented artist who emerged on the New York scene in the mid-70s. He wrote plays and essays, did public performance art, and made more than 40 imaginative, singular short films and videos, most of which are featured during this retrospective, two programs of which will be repeated at SAIC’s Hokin Hall. In these works, Sherman translates his trademark “spectacle” showcases—experimental “dramas” he performed alongside inanimate objects—into a cinematic medium, demonstrating his unique perception of film grammar....

Most music festivals have more than one stage these days, but when it comes to scale, Lollapalooza has few peers: this year it’s booked nearly 150 acts on eight stages. It’s difficult if not impossible to see more than a small fraction of the weekend-­long bill, unless you’ve got access to a jet pack or teleportation technology—the northernmost and southernmost stages are nearly a mile apart, which would be a 15-minute walk even if you didn’t have to maneuver through a crowd of 100,000 people....

Let’s say you’re at a show. It’s a small venue, or maybe it’s somebody’s basement. It’s loud and it’s crowded and there’s definitely nothing resembling a security staff. So there’s nobody you can alert when you see a guy who looks not quite sober standing over a woman and speaking to her aggressively. She also looks drunk, and she’s clearly uncomfortable. Then you realize you recognize this guy. Everybody in your scene knows this guy....

AP Photo A mother and her three-year-old daughter wait for a bus in McAllen, Texas, after leaving Honduras, which has been battered by violence. My daughter Laura lived just off the street a few doors from the private school where she taught for a year in Honduras. Whenever we Skyped, I braced for the sight of a violent stranger with a gun breaking into her room behind her. As she knew as well as we did—though we were the ones who kept bringing it up—Honduras was one of the most dangerous countries on earth....

courtesy of the artists The Jist The veteran Norwegian vocalist Sidsel Endresen and the imaginative young guitarist Stian Westerhus have only made one album together—their bracing 2011 collaboration, Didymoi Dreams (Rune Grammofon)—but it already seems to be exerting an influence on the country’s improvised music scene. The upstart label Va Fongool recently released the eponymous debut by an Oslo duo called the Jist, another voice-and-guitar project that channels extended technique and crazy effects into rigorous, abstract excursions across the realms of noise and texture....

Among the many issues bogging down Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq is its weak grasp of Chicago hip-hop. Like gun violence and its roots, hip-hop takes a backseat to Lee’s sex satire; this weakness might not be such an issue, except that music is central to the vision of the the city that Lee tried to capture, the title character is an aspiring rapper, and the film’s name came from the local hip-hop scene....

Rich Hein/Sun-Times Media Alderman Danny Solis said he’ll work with the mayor—any mayor, even if it’s Karen Lewis. Every now and then, I have one of those eye-opening revelations when I realize the world’s different than I thought. Go, Karen, go! So I babbled on as best I could: Well, you’ve been a loyal supporter of Mayor Rahm’s. And he’s, like, against everything Karen Lewis represents. So, you know—wouldn’t you fight like hell against her ideas should she get elected?...

When Charlie Trotter invented the kitchen table a quarter century or so ago, it was a way to bring diners into the life of the fine-dining kitchen. And the border between us (eating) and them (cooking) has been increasingly porous ever since. 42 Grams finally brings the kitchen into the lives of the chef and his hostess wife—the restaurant is literally downstairs from the apartment of chef Jake Bickelhaupt (who worked at Trotter’s) and his wife, Alexa Welsh....