A group of dedicated Great Lakes surfers is always chasing the next big wave, even if it means surfing in dangerous water alongside grimy landscapes home to some of the area’s largest polluters. Longtime surfer Rex Flodstrom says “the refineries, flame towers, and industry make a unique backdrop for surfing. Sometimes you see irregular clouds of black or orange smoke.” Flodstrom, a 46 year-old artist who lives in Streeterville, says the surfers are like “canaries in the coal mine just immersed in the water....

Mohammed Hamzah Khan knew he was being watched. The 19-year-old college student passed through security at O’Hare with his 17-year-old sister and 16-year-old brother on the afternoon of October 4, 2014. But even then, he expected to be stopped by federal agents who he thought had been spying on him. He was right. But Khan’s siblings told different stories, according to the federal officers: his sister said they intended to stay with a friend, while his brother said they were going to visit their cousins....

In March, electronic experimentalist Benjamin John Power responded to the ongoing crack-up of society with the feral, postindustrial World Eater (Sacred Bones), his third solo album as Blanck Mass. Best known as half of British group Fuck Buttons, Power understands how to craft profane, volatile instrumentation that evokes supernatural bliss, which he pulls off on World Eater even as he infects the album with overwhelming dread. Power has said that what he’s trying to do here is examine humanity’s “inner beast,” its fetish for violence....

DEAR READERS: Two weeks ago, I announced I would be taking a nice long break from questions about miserable sexless marriages. (I don’t get questions about happily sexless marriages.) I tossed out my standard line of advice to those who’ve exhausted medical, psychological, and situational fixes (“Do what you need to do to stay married and stay sane”), and I moved on to other relationship problems. Readers impacted by sexless marriages—men and women on “both sides of the bed”—wrote in to share their experiences and insights....

I suspect that the longevity of the Waltzing Mechanics’ El Stories series can be attributed to a couple of different factors. For one, its casual, documentary-style monologues—which are based on real rider experiences on the CTA—are varied and open-ended enough in concept that, even after yielding close to a decade’s worth of anecdotes, the premise hasn’t gotten stale. And secondly, the malleable nature of the show’s casting has made El Stories‘s different iterations over the years a sort of rite of passage in Chicago’s non-equity scene, like a post-grad showcase of fresh faces in the city’s industry....

In 2012, brothers David and Rene Pacheco emerged from East Los Angeles with Thee Commons, a band that blended elements of cumbia, chicha, surf, punk, psych, and more. Despite having all the ingredients for an excellent dance party, the group initially struggled to find a foothold in LA’s music scene, which like those of many major cities is often fragmented along genre, ethnic, and generational lines. But when Thee Commons finally built their own community, they hit their stride—and they hit it hard, electrifying fans from all walks of life with their high-energy music and over-the-top performances, which sometimes featured burlesque dancers, clowns, and/or guys in gorilla suits....

West-side rapper and M.I.C member Lil Chris is among a handful of locals who could spend a career testing the limits of Auto-Tune and its ability to melt, twist, and reshape syllables. Lil Chris uses the vocal processor to infuse hard-edged bars with hints of melancholy and add muscle to his rap-singing to further color his supple, full melodies. He’s got a lot of range when he sings, but Lil Chris is a rapper first and foremost; he’s not trying to be, say, Marvin Gaye, and Lil Chris is up-front about it on his latest single, “Let’s Get it On....

Bassist Joshua Abrams’s importance to Chicago’s jazz and improvised music scene over the last few decades is indisputable. He’s laid down the harmonic anchor in loads of disparate ensembles, providing muscle and shape to bands led by reedists Dave Rempis, Ernest Dawkins, and Jason Stein; cornetists Rob Mazurek and Josh Berman; flutist Nicole Mitchell; and drummers Hamid Drake and Mike Reed. That’s not even counting his membership in several combos that skirt clear genre lines, from the back-porch minimalism of Town & Country to the atmospheric art-rock of the Bird Show Band....

Via Google Plus Mark Konkol Bill Mullen, a retired Tribune reporter, remembers that when he broke in back in the 1960s, discussions in Chicago’s newsrooms would go like this: The Anne Keegan Award was created three years ago to honor the kind of journalism the late Tribune columnist and feature writer specialized in—observant, compassionate stories about people you probably had never heard of, “the little guy.” The DNAinfo stories fit the bill....

Michael Gebert Next’s latest menu, a retrospective look back at Trio, the Evanston restaurant that made a former French Laundry sous chef named Grant Achatz into one of the city’s—and eventually one of the world’s—most famous chefs, started this past weekend. But it’s one thing to serve guests the dishes of your younger self—and another to see your old friends from those heady days of youth. So last night Next and the Aviary threw a party for the people Achatz worked with at Trio from 2001 to 2004, and invited (for a price) assorted friends and good customers of his restaurants....

Growing up, comedian Kellye Howard felt invisible. Her parents showered attention on her two siblings, so Howard tried to steal it back. “I wrote stories and cried until my dad would sit down and listen to them,” she says. “I’d interrupt very heated backgammon games.” Howard was discovered in a Foot Locker while studying theater at Columbia College. A promoter overheard her venting to a coworker about a family of customers who’d claimed to speak no English but were obviously fluent in the language....

Russ Tutterow was a playwright’s “greatest advocate and friend,” Goodman Theatre artistic director Robert Falls said Monday night, welcoming about 300 members of Chicago’s theater community to a memorial event the Goodman hosted. “Russ, in this city, was central in his vision as a playwright’s agent . . . a playwright’s everything,” Falls said of the longtime Chicago Dramatists artistic director, who died May 4 at the age of 68 after a battle with cancer....

In 2013, Chicago chamber quintet Gaudete Brass were invited to play in a celebration for the 75th birthday of the American classical composer John Corigliano. His writing for their particular instrumentation, though, numbered exactly two brief works. So the ensemble commissioned a number of Corigliano’s disciples to create original music reflecting his influence, which they’ve compiled on their new album, Sevenfive: The John Corigliano Effect (Cedille). The record includes the first recordings of Corigliano’s “Antiphon” and “Fanfares to Music,” both for double quintets, but the real coup is the lineage it traces between Corigliano and his musical progeny—whether it’s the way Jonathan Newman’s four-movement “Prayers of Steel,” inspired by the poetry of Carl Sandburg, collides early jazz rhythms with muscular patterns that evoke Chicago skyscrapers, or the way Jeremy Howard Beck’s twitchy “Roar” generates tension with a relentless series of staccato stabs....

British singer Olivia Chaney emerged on the British folk scene nearly a decade ago, harmonizing behind Scotsman Alasdair Roberts and writing her own music. Over time her repertoire and ideas have broadened; on her 2015 debut album, The Longest River (Nonesuch), she placed gems by Chilean nueva canción pioneer Violeta Parra, baroque composer Henry Purcell, and Swedish jazz-folk artist Sidsel Endresen alongside original tunes that drew their elegant spirit from her homeland’s rich folk tradition....

Shannon Taylor, who plays guitar and sings in San Jose emo band Awakebutstillinbed, screams like she could go hoarse at a moment’s notice and is determined to make every last second of her forceful wail count. On the group’s January debut album, What People Call Low Self-Esteem Is Really Just Seeing Yourself the Way That Other People See You (which they’ve since rereleased on Tiny Engines), Taylor’s powerful presence helps push the four-piece band through their most shambolic moments—even her off-key notes feel like intentional instants of clarity....

Richard A. Chapman/Sun-Times Media Under repeated questioning, Cook County board president Toni Preckwinkle was happy to avoid saying whether she’s challenging Rahm for mayor. Toni Preckwinkle is going to keep answering the question by not answering the question. She said it a few more times after a much-ballyhooed speech to the City Club on Thursday. So when she faced reporters and TV cameras after her speech, the questions moved quickly from budget and jail matters to election politics....

It turns out the doctor dragged off a United plane at O’Hare has not only a past, but an inconvenient past. It’s a sleeping-dog past that journalists ought to let lie—at least that’s the contention made by David Uberti of the Columbia Journalism Review. And he’s far from the only person critical of the media that woke this particular dog. “Stories About United Passenger’s ‘Troubled’ Past Prompt Massive Backlash,” reads one headline on the Wrap....

The winter holidays invariably unleash a blizzard of Christmas-themed productions that range from the sentimental to the satiric. Hell in a Handbag Productions’ new show SnowGirls fits in the latter camp—and I do mean camp. With a book by Derek Van Barham and songs by David Cerda with Scott Lamberty and Jeff Thomson, this rude, raunchy, and funny burlesque of the 1995 Paul Verhoeven movie Showgirls is definitely more naughty than nice....

Richard A. Chapman/Sun-Times Media Toni Preckwinkle, the Cook County Board president, says thanks but no thanks to a mayoral bid. As recently as this weekend, when the Sun-Times released a poll showing Toni Preckwinkle ahead by a whopping 24 points, her campaign spokesman indicated that she was seriously considering a challenge against Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Not surprisingly, one of the first people to vocalize his renewed support for Preckwinkle was Emanuel....

Michael Gebert Next After reading Nick Kokonas’s fascinating 6,000-word manifesto-slash-case study for the ticketing system he devised for Next and Alinea, the reason you’d want to do something, anything, to do shake up the existing order becomes clear. As he says, “Three full-time employees answering phones, mostly to say ‘no’ to potential customers since 70 percent of people request the same times: Friday and Saturday prime times. This was costly payroll, costly phone lines, and, most importantly, frustrating to the callers....