On tour in support of her third LP, the new On Dark Horses (Sargent House), singer-songwriter Emma Ruth Rundle brings her captivating guitar sounds and ghostly vocals to the Empty Bottle for a set of haunting, melancholic postrock. Formerly of dreamy postrock trio Marriages and instrumental rock band Red Sparowes, Rundle has a style reminiscent of doomy shoegazers True Widow, but she imbues it with a folksy darkness that’s heavy on melody....

There’s something about Cirque du Soleil shows that drives me crazy. I mean in a good way—at least kind of in a good way. I mean, I love its shows to pieces, don’t get me wrong, but they also frustrate me, a lot. They obsess me, send my thoughts off in a thousand different directions at once. I leave Cirque du Soleil floating in a cloud of unknowing, bemused, silenced by a surfeit of images and feelings, with so many assorted pieces of the show floating around my head—costumes and performers and bits of music and overwhelming moments of aesthetic ecstasy—that when I try to put it all together and articulate what it all means ....

At Constellation on March 29, 2014, Chicago string ensemble Spektral Quartet celebrated the launch of a charming and savvy project called Mobile Miniatures, for which the group had commissioned 47 composers to write short pieces intended as cell-phone ringtones. The quartet played in the usual spot on the floor, surrounded on three sides by seating, but they’d set up a lot more than just their chairs and music stands. To the left and right of the performance area, toward the back of the room, the audience could use headphones to audition recordings of the ringtone compositions at iPad listening stations....

It’s telling that Mary Chase’s Harvey won the Pulitzer Prize in 1945, the final year of World War II. The previous winner had been a metatheatrical chronicle of apocalypse, The Skin of Our Teeth; the next would be a satire about political corruption, State of the Union. But as Allied forces advanced on Berlin, the gentlemen of the Pulitzer committee chose to honor a light comedy centered on one Elwood P....

Singer and songwriter Caleb Willitz has forged a beguiling sound that seems like it only could have emerged from Chicago. With each performance he works with a shifting cast of musicians and ends up reshaping his poetic folk-rock songs. As with last year’s Home (Peace of Coal), most of his bands feature top-notch improvisational voices from the local scene who change the complexion of the music and frequently extend his songs into powerful meditations....

Well, one thing we can say for sure about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: it’s alive. The great gothic novel’s 200th anniversary will be observed in Chicago with no fewer than four stage versions, three of them opening in the fall. And why not? Not only is this birthday round numbered, but the author is as iconic as they come for a culture that’s clearly undergoing a leap toward a new level of gender equality (yes, even despite implacable opposition)....

The racial grass gap hasn’t narrowed a bit. Though studies have found similar marijuana usage rates across racial groups, 78 percent of those arrested since August 2012 for carrying small amounts of pot were black, according to police department data. Another 17 percent were Hispanic, and just 4 percent were white—virtually the same breakdown as before the new possession ordinance went into effect. Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s press office did not respond to a request for comment....

America Ferrera and Michael Pena in Cesar Chavez Doc Films didn’t release their spring calendar until after we went to press, so we couldn’t list in our print edition what they’re showing next week. But it’s a fine program, and the opening week is loaded with classics. On Monday Wild Boys of the Road (1933), one of director William Wellman’s finest Depression-era dramas, kicks off a series on road movies....

Philip Montoro, Reader music editor Electric Wizard, “Satanic Rites of Drugula” I’ve loved UK drug-doom maniacs Electric Wizard for years, but I only just figured out the goofy horror-pulp lyrics to this slow-motion caldera collapse from 2007’s Witchcult Today. (A new album, Time to Die, drops September 30.) They’re about a vampire who gets blazed by feeding on druggies: “Your dope-laced blood shows me new highs / Bloodlust, druglust, Count Drugula arise....

There are a lot of cities in the world where you could dedicate yourself to eating nothing but street food and eat like a king for the rest of your days: Mexico City, Bangkok, Istanbul, Singapore, Austin, Los Angeles, and on and on. Chicago isn’t on that list. Yes, we have food trucks, but they’re crippled by an unfair law that inhibits them from thriving. We have sidewalk eloteros, fruteros, tamaleras, and taqueras, but they’re forced to exist as outlaws, dependent on the benign neglect of police and City Council members, and always vulnerable to their persecution....

As the city’s cultural historian, Tim Samuelson has had occasion to amass all manner of Chicago treasures: Eliot Ness’s handcuffs, chunks of the Wrigley Building, and discarded pieces of structures by Sullivan and Wright. Some of the artifacts are displayed in the home Samuelson shares with his wife at the Promontory Apartments, a Hyde Park building with its own historic pedigree as Mies van der Rohe’s first high-rise. In the kitchen, Samuelson keeps selections from his Popeil Brothers/Ronco gadget collection, relatively inexpensive, mass-produced items that he believes have considerable import as pieces of the city’s history....

“I wanted to use bold flavors with [the tonburi],” Cruz says, and “lamb fat goes very well with it.” He seared lamb shoulder as well, serving it with the risotto and dehydrated tonburi, plus two more preparations: tonburi rice crackers and tonburi chimichurri sauce. For the first he cooked the seeds with rice and water, spread the mixture onto a silicone mat, and dehydrated it, then deep-fried the crackers so they’d puff up like chicharrones....

Inside Man Each Thursday, the Logan Theatre screens a famous old film as part of its “Throw Back Thursday (#tbt)” series. This week’s selection is Spike Lee’s seminal Do the Right Thing, a true summer movie if ever there was one. Lee is a prolific auteur—he’s directed more than 30 narrative and documentary features since 1983—and one of the country’s most polarizing directors. His oeuvre is marked by peaks and valleys—or, in other words, some outright masterworks and plenty of outright failures....

Law enforcement leaders from throughout the nation are promising a kinder, gentler, more discriminating approach to policing and prosecuting. They’ve formed a group, Law Enforcement Leaders to Reduce Crime and Incarceration, whose cochairs include Chicago police superintendent Garry McCarthy. “The changes needed to achieve an incarceration rate in line with the rest of the developed world are staggering,” Coates writes. “The popular notion that this can largely be accomplished by releasing nonviolent drug offenders is false—as of 2012, 54 percent of all inmates in state prisons had been sentenced for violent offenses....

Wild Beasts were one of my favorite acts at the Pitchfork Music Festival this past weekend. I wrote in my Saturday recap that the band’s set was so seamless and airtight that it only added to their already slick demeanor, each member of the foursome working in a cool slow motion (triumphant fist pumps included). I’ve probably told someone at some point that their most recent album, Present Tense, isn’t my favorite in their catalog....

Q: I’ve been wondering: Since there are lesbians out there who occasionally crave cock, does the reverse also happen? Are there gay men who occassionally crave pussy? —This Possible? Q: I’m a 26-year-old woman. I started dating a fantastic guy a month ago, blah blah blah, we’ve already talked about marriage. The problem is that his dick isn’t up to par size-wise or staying-hard-wise. He was aware of this before I came along, and it made him an enthusiastic and skilled oral performer to make up for it....

Peripatetic bassist Matthew Golombisky didn’t stay long in Chicago, where he moved from New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina; after a few years he left for Oakland, and he now lives in Buenos Aires. Still, he’s deeply connected to Chicago’s improvised music community through Ears & Eyes Records, the label he started here, which has become a vibrant outlet for local artists, including Charles Rumback, Nate Lepine, and Twin Talk. Golombisky remains a musician too, of course, and this week he returns to Chicago to support Cuentos, his own new release on the label....

On November 17, 2014, comedian Dave Maher woke up and checked his Facebook account, where he saw that his friends and family had been mourning him as if he were already dead. That’s because on October 22 he went into a diabetic coma—for three and a half weeks his condition had shown no signs of improvement, and friends and family assumed he was lost. But after being moved to a hospital in his hometown of Cincinnati he was revived, just days before his parents had to decide whether or not to take him off life support....

Dinosaur 13—a documentary about the Tyrannosaurus rex fossil nicknamed Sue and owned by our own Field Museum of Natural History—reaches its nadir when paleontologist Peter Larson confesses that he used to talk to Sue through the exterior window of a storage space at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. Larson, a founder of the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research, Inc., supervised excavation of the giant fossil in August 1990 after Sue Hendrickson, one of his staff, discovered it in the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation in western South Dakota....

Though it’s only been a few weeks since the grand opening of iO’s new location, the performers have already made themselves at home. The hosts of the handful of shows I’ve seen introduced the new venue with great joy, giving directions to the two bars, bathrooms, and emergency exits near each of the four theaters. Those four theaters double iO’s capacity for shows including original sketch comedy like Trap, T.J. Jagodowski and Dave Pasquesi’s inaugural work in their own theater; experiments like The Boise Shuffle, in which a new show is written and performed every week; and twists on iO’s classic improv games like The Sharold, which groups comics at random to improvise with people they may never have performed with before....