Chicago Fringe Opera shows off its cast in a warm-up cabaret act of William Bolcom songs in the Chopin Theatre’s cozy underground lounge, then moves into the adjacent black box theater for a deliciously droll production of this one-hour romp of an opera, scored for two pianos and five singers. Composed by Bolcom in 2007—and based on a 16th-century play by Machiavelli called La Mandragola—and benefiting greatly from Mark Campbell’s hilarious lyrics, it’s the story of a woman who likes sex and gets it, along with everything else she wants, by outwitting the men in her life, including her husband and lover....

Since 2014, Chicago rapper-producer Supa Bwe has celebrated Independence Day by releasing new music. The first couple years he did it as a member of coulda-been-huge experimental rap group Hurt Everybody, and then last year he dropped his solo mixtape Dead Again 3. Supa planned to follow the tradition this year with Finally Dead, but on July 3 he announced on Twitter that he was rescheduling the release for a date TBD....

The Reader has covered the issue of CPD misconduct, particularly officer-involved shootings, for decades. If you’re new to the issue, or just need a refresher, here are a handful of stories from the archive that give context to the recent events. During his storied Reader career, John Conroy wrote 17 stories about Chicago police torture from 1990 to 2007—including detailed accounts of Jon Burge, the notorious detective and commander who used tactics such as electric shock and suffocation on African-American suspects....

Last October, Ryan Graveface was manning a booth at the Massacre, a 24-hour horror-movie marathon at the Portage Theater, hoping to sell some stock he’d brought from his collectibles shop in Savannah, Georgia. A man in his 60s walked over and began inspecting an LP copy of the score to Chopping Mall, a 1986 flick about murderous mall security robots. “He picked up the soundtrack,” says Graveface, “and was like, ‘This is a fucking abomination....

A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. In 1969, a 19-year-old New Yorker named William Powell, jacked up on revolutionary politics and infuriated by the growing police brutality against antiwar protesters, began compiling The Anarchist Cookbook, a how-to manual for sowers of mayhem. The book included detailed instructions for spying on and sabotaging electronic communications, using lethal weapons, and constructing bombs and booby traps. It contained recipes for TNT and LSD; it explained how to build a silencer for a pistol or machine gun and how to convert a shotgun into a grenade launcher....

Q: My wife and I have a decent sex life. Pretty vanilla, but we’re busy with work, chores, and life in general with two small kids, so I can’t complain too much. About a year after having our second kid, I went down on my wife. As usual, we both enjoyed it greatly. Unfortunately, about a week later she got a yeast infection. She attributed the YI to the oral, and since then I am strictly forbidden from putting my mouth anywhere near her pussy....

Nowadays, it’s strange to remember that it wasn’t that long ago when gay men who wanted to be out and proud—who wanted to dance and flirt and fuck without facing violence or death threats or worse from the straight community—had to seek safety in numbers and hide out in their own rainbow-colored ghettos. But we live in a kinder age, where Lady Gaga can sing “Born This Way” during the Super Bowl halftime show, same-sex couples can get married, and even straight boys can dance at Roscoe’s....

Sometimes it’s nice to be reminded of a particularly special body of work, if only to give it some loving reconsideration. I certainly don’t take the music that Mac Rebennack (aka Dr. John) created during the late 60s and early 70s for granted—every time I hear one of his prime cuts I have to resist diving into a rabbit hole of his classic stuff. But a couple of weeks ago the folks at Omnivore released The Atco/Atlantic Singles 1968-1974, a handy 22-track compendium that rounds up a lot—but not all—of the killer material he crafted after he graduated from ace studio musician to singular solo artist....

In the past week two members of the Chicago hip-hop pantheon have been making big public moves as they ready forthcoming albums. Lupe Fiasco dropped a horn-sampling single featuring ratchet crooner Ty Dolla $ign called “Next To It,” and it’s a banger that’s got me more interested in August’s Tetsuo & Youth than I otherwise expected. Meanwhile Common recently began posting profile photos of local street rappers (Lil Herb, G Count, etc) on Instagram along with quotes about their experiences in Chicago to promote Nobody’s Smiling; it’s an interesting marketing push that embraces this city’s hip-hop community, and I’m eager to see if Common approaches Chicago in a similar way with his new music....

During the artistic ascent of rock music during the 1960s, strains of psychedelia developed at an astonishing rate, with each individual scene advancing some unique take on the music. Sweden’s Träd, Gräs och Stenar only released music for a few short years during the early 70s, but they’re considered by some to have outstripped stateside psych acts in improvisatory daring on live recordings such as Djungelns Lag and Mors Mors. The band’s lineage stretches back through several noteworthy bands of the era: the caveman thudding of Pärson Sound gave way to the tripped-out noodling of International Harvester (later shortened to Harvester), hedging a bit closer to an Acid Test vibe before Träd, Gräs och Stenar brought it all together in a full embrace of bucolic hippie idealism....

“I always had the desire to create an exhibition space,” conceptual artist Edra Soto says. Offered a solo show at Northeastern Illinois University in 2012, Soto and her husband, Dan Sullivan—owner of Navillus Woodworks, which specializes in custom fabrication for art museums and galleries—imagined creating a structure to display their personal art collection. “The show would be an opportunity to comment on and talk about the artist-run spaces in Chicago. There’s a big community—people exhibiting in their loft or in their home or in their studio,” Sullivan says....

With any film festival, there’s the long and the short of it. More specifically, there are narrative and documentary features, which comprise the bulk of most major festivals, and then there are the short films, officially defined by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as “an original motion picture that has a running time of 40 minutes or less, including all credits.” Often overlooked for bigger stars, larger budgets, and longer running times, short films nevertheless embody the philosophy of any good film festival, which is to revel in the thrill of discovery and, more importantly, the opportunity to take risks with the medium....

[content-6] Dowell has a point. The #35—which runs all the way from Cicero Avenue to 31st Street Beach and has seven-day service, longer hours, and shorter headways—saw an average of 5,077 rides taken per weekday in 2017. It’s also worth noting that this isn’t the first time sustainable transportation has been blamed for traffic jams on this portion of 31st. In 2014, years before the bus pilot, then-Chicago Tribune transportation reporter Jon Hilkevitch called new protected bike lanes on this stretch “the reason why frustrated drivers often find themselves crawling in heavy traffic....

Kevin Coval recites his poem “Baby Come On: An Ode to Footwork,” which appears in A People’s History of Chicago. The beat is from Chance the Rapper’s Acid Rap, and the dancer is Litebulb from the Era. On the evening of Saturday, March 4, a multigenerational crowd wrapped halfway around the block outside the Harold Washington Library; teenagers with braces waited in line alongside silver-haired senior citizens. Everyone had come to celebrate A People’s History of Chicago (Haymarket Books), a new collection by Chicago poet Kevin Coval....

​ Jessica Koscielniak/Chicago Sun-Times On Republican Day last week at the Illinois State Fair in Springfield, Bruce Rauner arrived on his Harley. Hi folks​, great to see ya, and thanks for comin’ out. As you know, I wanna be your governor so we can shake up Springfield and bring back Illinois. I’m gonna take on the special interests, and drive those career politicians nuts. ​We’d release the full schedules, but they’re so complicated we think folks would misunderstand ’em....

Picture purrfect “It forced me to dig in deeper to think about what I cared about,” Berman says now. “I felt like, screw Starbucks, but didn’t know what the alternative was.” For friends and family outside the city who’d appreciate something quintessentially “Chicago” for a holiday gift, these elegant old-fashioned glass tumblers, featuring details of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Chicago-area buildings—the Avery Coonley Playhouse window in Riverside and the art-glass skylight in the Oak Park Home and Studio, for example—are less obvious than, say, a framed city skyline photo and considerably classier than a Chicago shot glass from Walgreens....

Richard A. Chapman/Sun-Times Legal guns are not Chicago’s real gun problem. Some say the editorial page is a newspaper’s Department of Futile Gestures, as the opinions expressed therein turn a nifty phrase or two a lot more often than they turn public opinion. There’s even a word by which journalists celebrate this futility, Afghanistanism—which is two-fisted advocacy in the service of remote corners of the earth that readers haven’t the slightest interest in and the paper hasn’t the slightest influence over....

The last time I mentioned Paul Salopek in a story was 2009. He’d been touted as a favorite for a Pulitzer Prize for his Tribune coverage of America’s war on terrorism in the Horn of Africa. And I noted, “A few weeks ago the Tribune dismantled its foreign service and Salopek left the paper.” “Although you’re joining it online, this discussion was actually kindled some 60,000 years ago, when our ancestors first wandered out of the prehistoric African Eden, and migrated across the Middle East and Asia, before crossing into North America and rambling to points south....

For the largest punk fest in North America, in some ways Riot Fest isn’t actually all that punk. When it comes to the gender balance of its lineups, the Chicago-based music festival is solidly within the status quo. I crunched the numbers for every Riot Fest lineup since its founding in 2005, including the Chicago, Toronto, and Denver festivals as well as the one-off 2012 events in Philadelphia, Dallas, and Brooklyn....

In the early 1800s, when passenger pigeons comprised one quarter of the bird population east of the Mississippi, a flock flying over what’s now Chicago could darken the sky for three days. By 1874, when an Evanstonian named J.G. Allyn killed this specimen and donated it to the Chicago Academy of Sciences (where it was preserved and stuffed), hunters in Wisconsin could bring down 1,200 pigeons before breakfast and cooks could buy birds ready for eating by the barrel....