Stephanie Bassos Neneh Cherry, the Reader team’s consensus favorite from Friday’s Pitchfork lineup Philip Montoro: I failed to follow my own advice on Pitchfork’s opening day: I missed Neneh Cherry. Actually I missed everybody—I was tied up at work till well after the media check-in closed at 7 PM. When this happened last year I made a joke about Professor X hanging out at the Xavier Institute while the X-Men go to music festivals, but I don’t think I can get away with anything like that twice....

Aimee Levitt Rena Olenick The traveling exhibit “Ruth Gruber: Photojournalist” officially opened on Sunday afternoon at the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center with a screening of Ahead of Time, a documentary about Gruber’s remarkable life, and a Q&A session with Gruber herself, via Skype from her New York apartment. Gruber can’t hear as well as she used to, or speak as forcefully, but a cousin of IHM curator Arielle Weininger had volunteered to sit at Gruber’s side in order to interpret....

In one recurring dream I’ve had since childhood, I’m riding a bicycle and suddenly find myself going downhill. I pick up speed, then discover that the brakes on the bike aren’t working. The road becomes slick, and obstacles start appearing from every direction. If I stop, I know I’ll crash or fall off the bike. I have no choice but to keep moving, lest something very bad will happen to me....

Self-taught Atlanta musician and visual artist Lonnie Holley has accrued ardent supporters since he dropped his first recordings earlier in the decade. Tonight he rolls into town with Animal Collective as the supporting act on their national tour. Due from Jagjaguwar in September, Holley’s new album MITH was cut in various sessions around the globe—from New York and Atlanta to Cottage Grove, Oregon, and Porto, Portugal—over the last five years. The diverse cast of stellar musicians who join him speak to his appeal; rediscovered new age icon Laraaji, folk duo Anna & Elizabeth, saxophonist Sam Gendel, and multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily are among his helpers, but Holley is utterly front and center....

Adam Schubert doesn’t have much left to prove to fans of Chicago underground rock. He plays guitar in psychedelic postpunk band Cafe Racer, which has put out albums with two of the scene’s best labels: their self-titled debut via Dumpster Tapes in 2016 and Famous Dust via Maximum Pelt this past February. Schubert is also a prolific singer-songwriter outside that group, though you’ll have to take his word for it: he’s been recording solo for around a decade, and in all that time the only material he’s released has been the June 2018 Dumpster Tapes EP Ruins by his project of the same name (not to be confused with Tatsuya Yoshida’s experimental duo)....

This veteran Dallas quartet was instrumental in defining the sound of alt-country in the mid-90s, layering hard-hitting shuffles, twang-drenched guitar, and the shiny melodies of singer Rhett Miller. The Old 97s return to that nearly 25-year-old formula like a favorite shirt on their 11th album, Graveyard Whistling (ATO), dutifully toggling between cliche and wit while serving up some songs about getting ripped and suffering heartbreak—occasionally within the same track (“Irish Whiskey Pretty Girls”)....

For the 40th Chicago Jazz Festival, the theme seems to be “more.” More days, more artists, and more interaction with the local jazz infrastructure. Several local venues and presenters that work regularly with jazz—including the Green Mill, Constellation, the Hungry Brain, the Old Town School of Folk Music, and Elastic—have received financial support from the festival to present free satellite shows beginning Friday, August 24, extending its reach into neighborhoods around Chicago and lengthening its schedule by nearly a week....

Q I’m a 26-year-old girl, and my boyfriend is bi. I assumed he would be less jealous than the average man. After all, a lot of bi men have faced irrational jealousy from women. But my BF is more jealous than average. He accuses me of having slept with my male friends in the past. He makes negative comments about how many people I’ve hooked up with. Whenever I won’t divulge something, he says, “Well, obviously that means you did hook up with that guy before we met/you do think that waiter was cute/you were looking at porn on your phone....

The Chef: Greg Bastien (The Winchester)The Challenger: Aaron Mooney (Webster’s Wine Bar)The Ingredient: Pumpkin seed oil He substituted pumpkin seed oil for half of the clarified butter in his recipe, saying that using just oil with no butter “would be way over the top.” After combining the two and warming the mixture to about 120 degrees, Bastien began to beat the egg yolks and water together in a bowl he held over a stove burner....

When the writer Osama Alomar emigrated from Syria to Chicago in 2008, he and many other Syrians could already foresee some of the troubles that were coming. The country was in the middle of a severe drought, and tensions were high between the Alawite government and the Sunni opposition. But no one anticipated the brutality of the civil war that broke out in March 2011, and Alomar expected he’d come back to visit every two years or so....

Getty Images Fans, analysts, and other philosophical types continue to debate whether soccer or baseball best represents the human condition—but what about doubles tennis? In the ebbing days of the World Cup, it was not enough to make the case for or against soccer. That had all been said. An appropriate adieu required putting soccer in its place, not simply as a sport among other sports but as an expression of the human condition....

Last week saw the release of two rather cynical American films, Brady Corbet’s Vox Lux and Clint Eastwood’s The Mule. The first addresses our culture’s acclimation to random violence, while the second considers our nation’s losing war on drugs. Neither film proposes solutions to the issues they raise, suggesting fatalistically that we’re simply stuck with them. But where Vox Lux raises a sense of alarm over this conclusion, The Mule—a more complex and ultimately more provocative work—is disarmingly upbeat....

An organized crime family maintain an underground cell where they keep their enemies shackled to the floor and make them learn how to knit. A woman thinks she hears a dripping sound somewhere in the distance, only to realize that her brain is melting; she shakes the liquid out of her ears as if it were seawater. A world-traveling vampire hunter promises his colleagues that a terrifying monster will arrive to aid them in their mission; the “monster” turns out to be a guy in a fuzzy frog costume....

In late 2014, a giant black banner appeared on the side of a building in Barcelona, Spain, the home of the annual Primavera Sound music festival. In a vaguely familiar heavy white font, it read simply ride. Speculation about a Ride reunion, stoked over the years by smirking “never say never” teases from various members, had been at a fever pitch since the breakup that fall of Liam Gallagher’s post-Oasis group, Beady Eye, in which Ride’s Andy Bell played guitar....

Michael Gebert Larry Tucker and his wife Ruby There’s a tiny “aquarium” smoker, the smallest model I’ve ever seen, in the window of month-old Crazy Bird Chicken in the East Garfield Park neighborhood. But Larry Tucker, a man once celebrated for barbecue back when it hardly existed on the north side, seems ambivalent about using it. “That was here, it wasn’t part of my original concept. But it seems like I’m going to have to incorporate it because the neighborhood people come alive when they smell that smell....

With President Trump issuing frightening proclamations on a daily basis—hard to believe it’s only been about two weeks since he took office—many of you undoubtedly forgot your city or state even exist. Shortly thereafter, Board of Education member Michael Garanzini talked about trimming the school year. Apparently, the district is still broke, even with the backdoor pay cuts. The Madigan-Rauner fight goes back to January 2015, when the governor roared into office determined to force Democratic legislators to pass union-busting legislation that would effectively dismantle collective bargaining rights in Illinois....

Born Ready Who’d expect the trash-championing Factory Theater to mount an unabashedly sentimental comedy with legit dance numbers, heart-on-the-sleeve romance, and only a couple veiled vagina jokes? Stacie Barra’s charming, well-crafted homage to 1950s backstage intrigue films (think a kinder, gentler All About Eve) focuses on former child film star Marion Kroft’s struggle to restart her alcohol-steeped career in television variety shows. With the unlikely assistance of enthusiastic chorus girl Harriet, whose Iowa naivete may mask questionable motives, Kroft finds legit stardom looming....

Q: Straight and married but not boring, and heading to my parents’ house for our first family Christmas since my asshole MAGA brother “stumbled over” the Tumblr blog where the wife and I posted about our sexual adventures. (Pics of MMF threesomes and cross-dressing/pegging sessions, plus some dirty “true enough” stories.) My brother has always been an angry screwup, so he leapt on the chance to make me look bad by sending the link to my parents, siblings, and even some close family friends....

For Chicago the reckless mid- to late-90s Crypt Records-style punk rock—with a bit of playful bounce and a lot of fuck-it rock ’n’ roll greaser attitude—was best embodied by its heroes in the Mushuganas. Their 1995 Dropout Girl seven-inch and, even better, their 1998 self-titled debut full-length on long-defunct Rocco Records are relics of an era, with blown-out tinny production, anthemic gargling and gruff vocals, and a flair for the dirty and wily three-second guitar solo....

Guitarist Brian Case of Disappears says the beloved local four-piece went on hiatus this fall—bassist Damon Carruesco wanted to focus on his art and design work (and his solo electronic project, Tüth). Case, drummer Noah Leger, and guitarist Jonathan van Herik will carry on as FACS, which Case describes as “dark music,” but from a “different perspective” than the most recent Disappears albums. “There are a lot of feelings involved when you put something like this on the back burner, but this is just a different way to push ourselves into the void,” he says....