If you go by Sarah Louise’s two releases to date, she’s a splendid 12-string acoustic guitarist operating in the American Primitive tradition. She composed the tunes on the cassette Field Guide (Scissor Tails) and the LP VDSQ Solo Acoustic Vol. 12 (Vin du Select Qualitite) by devising new tunings whose unfamiliar resonances yielded jumping-off points for her instrumentals to change course every few measures, like a stream cutting through the Appalachian Mountains where she lives....

There’s a Facebook page that calls itself Unfriend Trump Supporters and tells the world, “It’s time to finally tell your Facebook friends that you will not support those who support bigotry, sexism and xenophobia.” In the eyes of those who aren’t, to be a Trump supporter apparently is to be all those things. And sure enough, on my home page I see anguished “friends” turn to each other for counsel on whether to unfriend neighbors, classmates, even brothers and sisters who think intolerable thoughts....

When Jenny Magnus moved to Chicago in 1987, her career objective was to “do stuff.” Among the first stuff she got done was cofounding Curious Theatre Branch, the cramped, amenity-free North Avenue storefront that became the epicenter of the nascent Wicker Park theater movement. That movement exploded and helped transform an ossifying off-Loop scene into a vital playground for artistic experimentation and aesthetic innovation. Thu 2/20, 8 PM; Sat 2/22, 6 PM; Sun 2/23, 9 PM...

On Monday, the day before the big midterm elections, when all my friends were losing their minds with angst and anxiety, Nate Cohn weighed in with his election predictions. So now Nate Cohn is Nate Silver. Leading me to wonder—do you gotta be named Nate to get a numbers-crunching job with the New York Times? Dude, I could have told you that, and my first name’s not even Nate! Sixth congressional district: Sean Casten v....

Yesterday Jessica Hopper announced that Wednesday had been her last day as an employee of recently Condé Nast-isized multimedia music conglomerate Pitchfork, where she’d been a senior editor for the website and editor in chief of print quarterly The Pitchfork Review since October 2014. Yesterday was my last day at Pitchfork, sad I didn’t get a chance to write/publish my “Mac DeMarco is the Millennial Leo Sayer” think piece. — Jessica Hopper (@jesshopp) November 12, 2015...

Andrew Cioffi/Lyric Opera of Chicago Lyric’s Anthony Freud, Andrew Davis, and via Skype, Renee Fleming, who’s about to debut at the Super Bowl Earlier this week Lyric Opera revealed its 2014-2015 “Diamond Anniversary” season of eight operas, a musical, and other special events. General director Anthony Freud and music director Andrew Davis presided over the announcement at the Civic Opera House in the flesh, flanked, at various points, by a slightly pixilated version of creative consultant Renee Fleming on twin screens, via Skype....

On Sunday singular German drummer Jaki Liebezeit died in his sleep at age 78 while suffering a sudden case of pneumonia. He leaves behind a profound musical legacy, the cornerstone of which is his membership in influential art-rock band Can—nearly five decades later, the records he made with that group sound fresher and more original than anything the vast majority of their contemporaries produced. Can were key figures in the Krautrock scene (along with the likes of Kraftwerk, Neu!...

Interviewed in the early 1970s, Groucho Marx explained why he had stopped working with his brothers two decades earlier, bringing down the curtain on the greatest comedy team in movie history. “By the time we got around to making those last films I was close to 60,” he said. “I found myself hanging upside down and doing all sorts of crazy things a man that age shouldn’t be doing. I had saved my money and I was bored....

Tonight Chicago jazz and improvised-music fixture Tim Daisy launches a short midwestern and southern tour with the fiery Polish reedist Mikolaj Trzaska, a regular collaborator in recent years. They first came together as members of Ken Vandermark’s Resonance Ensemble, and they’ve since worked together in the quartet Inner Ear with New York trombonist Steve Swell and Swedish tubaist Per-Åke Holmlander. The duo’s shows are in support of a terrific, concise new album the pair just released on the drummer’s Relay Records imprint called In This Moment....

The rust belt is getting more attention than it’s had in a long time. Since November an entire subgenre of journalism has been dedicated to understanding the people who elected the new president, many with datelines from Michigan or Ohio or Wisconsin. The first, narrative half of the book is even more direct. “An important part of Midwestern identity is believing you don’t have an accent,” McClelland writes on the first page, that “there’s absolutely nothing exotic about Midwestern speech”—because there’s not supposed to be anything exotic about the midwest at all....

Having spent 13 years as a wardrobe and prop stylist, Klafeta says the transition into home design felt natural: “It’s all related—trying to make things look good, fitting things together.” Experience creating custom looks on a small budget has served her well. By using rejected pieces of reclaimed wood, for instance, she was able to floor her second level for $600. The bathroom wallpaper is actually gift wrap coated with vinyl plastic....

Former Chicagoan and Second City alum Katie Rich was suspended from her writing position on Saturday Night Live after she posted a tweet on January 20 in which she joked that Barron Trump, the ten-year-old son of President Donald Trump, “will be this country’s first homeschool shooter.” Rich apologized on Twitter, but the the initial tweet and SNL‘s disciplinary action has sparked debates about the apparent double standard of who gets reprimanded for posts on social media, censorship of comedians (and the pressure to self-censor), and whether a child, even if he happens to be the son of the president of the United States, is fair game for humorists....

In 2011, Erik Wallace (aka rapper Mister Wallace) and Anthony Pabey (aka producer Aceb00mbap) met at the Boystown cocktail lounge Wang’s; four years later they launched Futurehood, a label that supports gay and transgender musicians of color. “My driving force was to create a space there that was what Boystown was not providing, giving, or sheltering,” Pabey told the Advocate in 2016. He knew there was a thriving scene in the queer community, even if it wasn’t as immediately apparent to all: “I really feel like the queer rappers are the purest form of what rap is and what hip-hop is....

For nearly a decade, Chicago’s Dead Rider have devoted their genius to the underground rock scene; they’ve made five albums and each release has been a remarkable occasion. Their new one, Dead Rider Trio Featuring Mr. Paul Williams (Drag City, out October 19), is a collaboration with London-based spoken-word artist and experimental musician Williams that was recorded in a sort of exquisite-corpse format, and what strikes me most of all about it is how mesmerizingly hilarious it is....

Adam Jason Cohen grew up in New Jersey building DIY skate parks with his friends on unused land. The reward was not just a place to skate, but also a chance to watch how new communities developed in those formerly abandoned spaces. When the Chicago-based photographer learned that a group of south-siders had done the equivalent for dogs on tennis courts in Jackson Park, except with handmade agility equipment instead of half-pipes—naturally they called it Jackson Bark—he took his own dog, Molly, a seven-year-old pit bull, to check it out....

David Koechner’s recent performance as a wealthy sadist in the low-budget drama Cheap Thrills ranks among the more interesting screen performances this year. A veteran character actor best known for playing cartoon idiots (Anchorman: The Legend of Rob Burgundy, NBC’s The Office), Koechner is surprisingly convincing as the film’s mephistophelean villain, who coerces the hapless protagonists into performing a series of degrading stunts. Koechner’s comedy background is evident in his boisterous line readings, which sound vaguely funny even when his character says awful things....

Not surprisingly the freshest movie in town this week is the one directed by the eternally youthful Jean-Luc Godard. A Married Woman (1964), showing at the Gene Siskel Film Center in a new digital restoration, finds the writer-director (then 33) so enraptured with filmmaking that he has to try out a different technique in practically every scene. Godard shoots one scene at an angle perpendicular to the action; processes the negative of the image in another, so that whites appear as blacks, and vice versa; ventures into the realm of cinema verite, incorporating interviews with members of the cast and with another filmmaker (documentarian Roger Leenhardt); and executes ambitious long takes and Eisenstein-worthy montages....

On Saturday the Chicago Beer Society hosted its annual Day and Night of the Living Ales at Goose Island Wrigleyville, and for the first time since 2011, I was there. Do you want to know who won? I won’t tease. Let’s start there. And the Golden Tut? It went to Half Acre‘s English brown ale the Hammer, the Bullet, and the Vise. Also in the top three? Metropolitan’s Cherry Generator, a choice that won’t surprise anybody who’s read my review of the civilian version of this splendid doppelbock....

Michael Gebert Logan Poser Ramen, version two I’ve been working (and photographing) my way through the city’s ramen, now that it is the hippest thing to eat in the city and will be for at least another month. The other night I went to eat and photograph Yusho’s Logan Poser Ramen, a dish whose name has only become more apropos with time. I had it once, long ago, but apparently merely ate it, didn’t photograph it, so I didn’t remember exactly what it looked like (here’s a pic)....

“People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York—a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children,” wrote Washington Post opinion writer Richard Cohen on November 11, 2013, speaking of the election of Bill de Blasio to succeed Michael Bloomberg as the Big Apple’s big kahuna. Added Cohen, parenthetically: “(Should I mention that Bill de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, used to be a lesbian?...