The war is over. The Pandavas have wiped out their royal cousins, the Kauravas, and Yudisthira is the rightful king of all he surveys. Except that what he surveys is horrible to contemplate: a vulture’s paradise, where mad widows root through heaps of severed body parts, trying to reassemble their husbands. Too traumatized to claim his crown, Yudisthira declares the victory a defeat. How can he rule? What is there left to rule?...

Despite backlash from members of the local Italian-American community, Chicago aldermen are proceeding with their proposal to rename Balbo Drive and move or modify the Balbo Monument, memorials to a henchman of fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. The tributes were added shortly after Italo Balbo, a leader of the Blackshirts paramilitary units and later Mussolini’s air commander, landed at Chicago’s 1933 Century of Progress World’s Fair with a squadron of 24 seaplanes....

Just as Califone arose the from the ashes of Red Red Meat, Red Red Meat was born from the disintegration of Friends of Betty, one of Chicago’s most passionately fucked-up rock bands during the late 80s, when few chose to be genuinely weird. That trio featured singer-guitarist Tim Rutili, drummer Ben Massarella—the two common members of all three bands—and bassist Glynis Johnson. At their peak, Rutili replaced Massarella with John Rowan, who would soon achieve greater fame and/or ignominy as Blackie Onassis of Urge Overkill....

Jason Prechtel was troubled by Ventra. Cubic was a familiar name. It was responsible for the Chicago Card too. I recently spoke with Prechtel about his battle to find out more about the privatization of the CTA’s fare collection system. It’s like, “Wait a second, Chicago media—why not connect the dots further? Why are we looking at Ventra as this Chicago-specific thing when this company has a very searchable track record?...

Putting the piece on alone was something of a necessity, Starr writes over email. “There’s a period that I think every comedian or performer who makes their own work deals with, where it feels like pulling teeth to get people to work with you,” they explain. “Not necessarily because they hate you, but because of scheduling. There’s not enough hours in the day.” One of the show’s songs, “Freeze,” uses the form of a classic improv game to analyze this competitive rat race side of Chicago acting....

Uptight On Sunday at 4 PM Black Cinema House will screen the rarely revived Uptight (1968), a drama set among black revolutionaries in Cleveland, Ohio. Urban planner and architecture critic Lee Bey will introduce the film and lead an informal discussion afterwards (tickets are free, but it’s recommended you reserve a seat—you can RSVP here). The movie features an original score by the great Booker T. Jones (his only one, save for John Cassavetes’s Opening Night) and a cast that includes Roscoe Lee Browne, Juanita Moore, and Ruby Dee, who also cowrote the script....

Bonnie and Clyde Kokandy Productions does all it can with Frank Wildhorn, Don Black, and Ivan Menchell’s 2011 Broadway flop (it only ran for four weeks), here in a Chicago premiere. The performances crackle (in particular Desiree Gonzalez and Max DeTogne as the titular star-crossed outlaws), the score soars under John Cockerill’s musical direction, and the pace moves at a fine clip under director Spencer Neiman. Sadly, however, Wildhorn and company have put some formidable roadblocks in the way of success: some of the ballads slow things to a crawl, and Menchell’s book feels unfocused and fragmented at times....

Can someone die from being too boring? According to the new webseries Diagnosis: Boring, the answer is “yes.” In the first episode of the Chicago-made show, a doctor tells Jess (Ana Silva) that she has “Super Boring as Shit” syndrome and only a few weeks to live. There’s a possibility she’ll survive if she takes antiboring meds and adjusts her habits to make herself more cool. (“You must start smoking cigarettes,” her doctor says....

There have been plenty of occasions over the last few months when I’ve sat down to write about ersatz Chinese food, or half-assed barbecue, or yet another costly multicourse tasting menu, when I’ve been hit by one thought that stops me midsentence: Who the hell can eat at a time like this? For generations of immigrants, the restaurant industry has been a hub of steady work. New Americans have blessed cities like Chicago, opening their own spots to serve the food from their countries of origin and providing spaces for the homesick to get together, eat good food, and feel connected to the people and places they left behind....

Chicagoan John Corbett, gallerist, music critic, and occasional Reader contributor, has been working on a biography on the German saxophonist Peter Brötzmann for several years now, and I eagerly await its completion. Corbett knows both Brötzmann’s music and the free-jazz icon’s history inside and out, and he’s one of few writers able to properly and meaningfully situate Brötzmann’s work within a global context. Knowing that his biography is in the works, I was a little surprised to get a copy of a new book called Peter Brötzmann: We Thought We Could Change the World (Wolke Verlag), a stunning collection of his conversations with the respected French jazz critic Gerard Rouy....

Bengalis love their fish. Situated on the Ganges Delta, the world’s largest, where several rivers spill into the Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh and the Indian states of West Bengal and Assam are home to a plenitude of freshwater edible species. Their consumption is inextricably tied to the identity of the people who live in the region. In a paper on the subject, food writer Colleen Sen quotes a famous proverb: “Machhe bhate bangali,” or “Fish and rice make a Bengali....

When considering the curious rift that’s supposedly developed between our governor and mayor, it’s important to remember that they’re actually pals. They’ve vacationed together, drunk really expensive bottles of wine together . . . one even helped the other make his first million. By the way, while we’re on the subject, the president of SBC at the time was William Daley, brother of Mayor Daley. The governor’s ostensible purpose was to talk about the need for less governmental red tape in regulating the distribution of liquor licenses—not exactly a burning issue of the day....

Susy Schultz The Community Media Workshop performs an exemplary media service: it connects Chicago reporters looking for stories to tell with neighborhood organizations whose stories need telling. Over its 25 years of playing this role, CMW has made itself a fixture in Chicago’s media ecology. But now it faces a threat to its existence: there are fewer mainstream-media reporters than there once were, and the ones who survive aren’t looking as hard at the neighborhoods....

It was less than two weeks before the start of Pitchfork, and all Anna Cerniglia knew about the geometric village she’d been contracted to build in Union Park was that it would consist of two small huts designed by the artists Chad Kouri and Heather Gabel. Or maybe one large pyramid. It all depended on Pitchfork’s safety regulations. She didn’t know where in the park it would be located or which carpenter would do the actual construction....

Not one of the 17 people held for questioning at O’Hare International Airport Saturday was a refugee—or a terrorist for that matter. Most of them were visa or green card holders who had previously been granted long-term or permanent residency in the United States. Two of them were babies who had been born in the U.S. and who had been taken to Iran to meet their extended families. But all had the misfortune of being in transit on Friday evening when President Donald Trump issued his executive order banning nationals of six mostly Muslim countries from entering the U....

As soon as I started reading a post that ran on this very blog last week, “A dog drinks Bowser Beer for dogs,” a question burst into my mind. The mystery enveloped me—it wormed its way into my head and burrowed into my brain—I couldn’t escape it: What did Bowser Beer, a drink made specifically for dogs, actually taste like? I read the article three times. No answer. As I sat there, unable to rid myself of this cursed query, fate settled itself onto my shoulders....

Tom Stoppard’s 1993 masterpiece, set in two different eras although in the same drawing room in Sidley Park, an English country estate, displays the playwright’s usual polymathic love of diverse subjects. These include the second law of thermodynamics, Lord Byron, and landscape gardening, for starters. But Arcadia also serves as a love letter to hunger—for love itself, for fame, and above all, for knowledge. As one character declares, “It’s wanting to know that makes us matter....

There’s a startling dessert at Appellation, the wine-bar adjunct to the new Pastoral cheese outpost in Andersonville. It features an Italian cheese called Il Nocciolo, formed from a trifecta of cow, sheep, and goat’s milk and crafted in southern Piedmont, where cheese makers have a talent for soft-ripened formaggio like Robiola. The square of dense, pasty-white Il Nocciolo is served with triangles of rigid, rosemary-scented shortbread and a dollop of sweet cranberry jelly, both much needed to stand up to the tangy barnyard punch this cheese delivers....

Poker players are traditionally segregated into two groups (aside from winners and losers, of course): analytical players and feel players. The analytical—or “math”—grinders put their trust in probability, game theory, and statistics. Make the mathematically optimal play, they believe, and eventually the money will be theirs. Feel players are a little more old-school, what movies romantically portray as the wise table veteran, able to read an opponent’s soul. Though Whitehead often repeats that he loves Texas Holdem, the variety played at the Main Event, there’s little actual love in the book....

Ann Dvorak and Lee Tracy in The Strange Love of Molly Louvain, which screens tomorrow at the Patio Theater As we reported on Friday, tomorrow night marks the Patio Theater’s last screening for the foreseeable future, as the Northwest Chicago Film Society will present a 35-millimeter print of The Strange Love of Molly Louvain (1932). This crime drama doesn’t have much of a reputation today, even though it was directed by Michael Curtiz and produced by Warner Brothers, which made some of the roughest and toughest pre-Code features....