This Friday at 7 PM, Northwestern University’s Block Cinema will host one of the major cinematic events of the year with the local premiere of The Arboretum Cycle (2017), a collection of seven interconnected short works by veteran avant-garde filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky. One of the country’s most important living film artists, Dorsky has been making meditative, generally rapturous movies since the early 1960s. He has described his practice as “devotional cinema” (he also wrote a book with that title in 2003), referring to the potential of movies to engender spiritual experiences....

With paws like these, this wolf is at a disadvantage when it comes to guitar, but if anyone could teach us how to play a G chord with no opposable thumbs, it’d be Nathaniel Braddock! He plays guitar in the Occidental Brothers Dance Band International and teaches at the Old Town School, where over the years his Kill Yr Idols ensemble classes have helped people learn 80s indie-rock classics by the Minutemen, Dinosaur Jr....

Q I’ve heard your calls for bisexuals to come out to their friends and family, and I think it’s a great idea. Here’s my conundrum: I’m not sure I technically classify as “bisexual.” I’m a 40-year-old guy who strongly prefers sex with women to men (percentagewise I’m 70/30). I’ve had sex with dudes in the past (five or six times) and loved it, though I’ve never had the same emotional attachment and attraction that I’ve had with women....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Tuesday, August 1, 2017. Rahm urges Rauner to sign school funding bill Mayor Rahm Emanuel urged Governor Bruce Rauner to sign Senate Bill 1, which revamps the state’s school funding and gives $220 million to Chicago Public Schools for teacher pensions. Rauner has promised to issue an amendatory veto against the bill’s provision for what the governor calls a CPS “bailout.” “This is a four-decade-long effort to finally do what people for years have been talking about doing,” Emanuel said Monday....

In Star Trek, space is the final frontier, but for Rafael Toral it’s just another step in an ongoing creative odyssey. The Portuguese electronic musician’s work has gone through several phases. Between 1994 and 2004 he released a series of records that dealt with continuous sounds, often generated using electric guitars and outboard effects. In 2006 he introduced the Space Program, in which he improvised with jazz-rooted rigor against a backdrop of silence, using electronic instruments that he either made himself or converted from commercial products such as toy amplifiers; with the modified instruments, Toral manipulated sine waves and feedback via physical gestures....

Seriously strange Chicago art-rock outfit Ono had been at it since 1980, though after releasing their album Ennui in ’86, the group went silent for decades. It could’ve stayed that way if Reader contributor Steve Krakow hadn’t reached out to a couple founding members—bassist-percussionist P. Michael and front man-slash-performance artist Travis—for his Secret History of Chicago Music strip back in 2007; that year Ono went on to play Krakow’s Four Million Tongues Festival with the End of the World Band....

Paleontologists can only make educated guesses about the circadian rhythms of saber-toothed cats, but Chicago’s Sabertooth is indisputably nocturnal. Since November 1992 this indefatigable band—currently a quartet with woodwind players Pat Mallinger and Cameron Pfiffner, organist Pete Benson, and drummer Ted Sirota—has been seen almost exclusively after midnight, presiding over an after-hours jazz party at the Green Mill. In order to celebrate 25 years of that gig, though, the group will brave the afternoon sun on Friday and play the Jay Pritzker Pavilion....

Sometime around 1926, a middle-aged Jew named Mordechai Weiss flees Poland for the United States, taking his four-year-old daughter Rose with him. Rose’s older sister, Lusia, has scarlet fever and can’t travel, so she stays back with Mama. In theory, Lusia and Mama will join Rose and Mordechai later, but the years go by and for one reason and another—Mordechai is too tight to borrow the fare money, Mama doesn’t really want to travel, Lusia marries Duvid and has a baby—they don’t....

On January 2, I braved the howling winds and trekked through mounds of snow to Alderman Ameya Pawar’s north-side office. It was music to my ears. I fell head over heels in love with his candidacy, as though it were a movie by the Coen brothers. I chided him for the Tea Party remark. To his credit, he didn’t hurl F-bombs at me—at least not when I was listening. Instead, he asked if we could meet....

Q: I’m a thirtysomething straight woman married for 16 years. Eighteen months ago, I met a man and there was an immediate attraction. For the first 15 months of our relationship, I was his primary sexual and intimate partner, as both sex and intimacy were lacking in his marriage. (My husband knew of the relationship from the start and is accepting for the most part.) After my lover’s wife found out about me, she suddenly became very responsive to my lover’s sexual and emotional needs....

Starting back in the 1950s, the Alley was a sprawling weekly party in Bronzeville where people of all ages came together to hang out, exchange ideas, spin jazz records, and perform. Flanked by murals and photographs, the jazz happenings lasted for nearly 30 years until the host was forced to close them down. Its spirit persists today, however: iterations of the Alley—including Back Alley Jazz, held in July 2018—have moved into new spaces on the south side....

South-side DJ collective the Chosen Few, which Wayne Williams founded as a high school student in 1977, played an instrumental role in popularizing disco and house music in Chicago during the late 70s and early 80s—at first, both styles were largely confined to gay clubs. Given the huge influence that house has had on pop’s subsequent development, its embryonic years have acquired a mythological glow that rubs off on any artist active in the field at the time—and the Chosen Few have found a way to share their slice of that glory....

Plenty of flourishing Nashville songwriters have failed to translate the success they’ve had penning hits for artists into onstage popularity in their own right, but Chris Stapleton has delivered gold—actually, double platinum. After topping the charts with songs for the likes of Kenny Chesney, George Strait, Luke Bryan, Brad Paisley, and Dierks Bentley, he joined their ranks with his 2015 debut album, Traveller (Mercury), a convincing collision of outlaw-country verities and raspy soul modes....

Last week, Shawn Rosenblatt of the local one-man indie-rock project Netherfriends posted an EP to Bandcamp that he recorded in 2013. The simple bedroom-pop record is called Logan Square, and delivers six quick tunes that are packed with harsh and biting commentary on staples of the Chicago garage-rock scene: Rosenblatt blatantly talks shit about brother-sister duo White Mystery, late-night spot the Owl, and shuttered DIY venue Animal Kingdom, among others. His commentary is both hilarious and really mean-spirited, calling out kids for being in crappy bands, dressing badly, and overusing drugs; it’s clear he’s got a bone to pick with the people who make noise around town....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Tuesday, September 19, 2017. Kenneka Jenkins’s family asks FBI to investigate her death in hotel freezer The family of Kenneka Jenkins is asking the Federal Bureau of Investigation to investigate her death at a suburban hotel. Jenkins was found dead in a freezer September 10 at the Crowne Plaza O’Hare & Conference Center in Rosemont, and on Friday officials released video showing her staggering alone through the hotel’s hallways and in the kitchen....

Templeton Rye has a fascinating history—one that the company plays up heavily in its marketing, where it touts its “Prohibition era recipe.” The Templeton whiskey that’s for sale today, however, is not distilled in Templeton, Iowa, nor is it made using a recipe from the Prohibition era. Whether that matters has been the subject of considerable debate, but that’s a blog post for another day (for tomorrow, to be precise)....

To an older generation, George Takei is likely best known for his role as Hikaru Sulu in the TV show Star Trek and the many movies spun off from it. To a younger generation, Takei is arguably better known for his wide-reaching social media presence. More than ten million people have liked his Facebook page, and he boasts more than 2.5 million Twitter followers. George Takei: They initially invited me to participate at their opening....

“I’m not building restaurants to make everybody happy,” restaurateur Brendan Sodikoff (Maude’s Liquor Bar, Au Cheval, Bavette’s Bar & Boeuf, Gilt Bar) told Zagat last fall. “I think that’s a direct path to mediocrity.” First-timers are given a gruff orientation by one of several bearded male employees (maybe it’s my imagination, but facial hair seemed as ubiquitous as brisket here). Basically: get your own water and food. And clean up after yourself....

Martha Graham’s reputation as the patron saint of modern dance rests not only on her stupendous oeuvre but also her convictions about dance. Her most influential belief, arguably, is the idea that dance has a sacramental dimension that can be regarded as an outward sign of an inward practice of vision, faith, and desire—where vision means seeing dance as a way of affirming life through movement, faith means trusting that “wherever a dancer stands, that spot is holy ground,” and desire means exploring sexual tension through a contraction of the pelvis that twists the torso around a pivot point deep in the gut....

Julia Thiel Michael Lachowicz If there’s anything more ridiculous than a group of food nerds in a strip club ignoring everything else around them while taking pictures of their steaks, I can’t think of it. But not long ago I journeyed out to the suburban Stone Park “gentleman’s club” Club Allure. That’s the one next to the convent, whose nuns have raised their proverbial pitchforks against it. But I wasn’t there for the entertainment, inside or outside....