Noah Kalina Olga Bell Olga Bell joined Dirty Projectors as a keyboardist and singer in advance of its most recent album, the wonderful 2012 release Swing Lo Magellan, and there’s clearly a shared sensibility between that group and her solo work, as her forthcoming album, Krai (due out April 29 from New Amsterdam), evinces. Born in Russia, Bell lived there until she was seven, and she wrote all of the songs on Krai in her native tongue....

The number of craft breweries in Chicago continues to grow exponentially. Over the past year, the newcomers I’ve written about for my Beer and Metal column—just a fraction of the total—include Temperance, Penrose, DryHop, Une Annee, Transient, Forbidden Root, Middle Brow, and Cahoots. This expansion demonstrates the difference between a bubble magicked up by financial-sector legerdemain and organic growth driven by an actual product that real people want—and it guarantees that the Illinois Craft Brewers Guild’s fifth annual Chicago Craft Beer Week, which runs from Thu 5/15 till Sun 5/25, will be more than a rehash of last year’s extravaganza....

Al Podgorski/Sun-Times Media City officials say they’re mobilizing more cleanup crews as well as hiking fines to fight graffiti. Aldermen are poised to sign off Wednesday on a mayoral proposal that would increase the fines for those convicted of illegal graffiti—even though one of the measure’s chief sponsors says that such fines are rarely collected. But it’s not clear that the current law is being enforced. Alderman Michael Zalewski (23rd Ward), who’s cosponsoring the ordinance, said fines are so rarely collected that the notion of generating money from enforcement is “fictional....

Ron P. Jaffe/Fox © 2014 Fox Television Ted (Josh Radnor) and Tracy, aka “the mother” (Cristin Milioti) “That’s it. That’s the end of the show,” I said rather confidently to my friend. We had just finished watching “Sunrise,” the 17th episode of the ninth and final season of CBS’s How I Met Your Mother. Now, I don’t think HIMYM creators Carter Bays and Craig Thomas “ruined” the show for me with this ending, but I still felt a little cheated....

Steven Senne/AP PHOTOS The media claimed James Foley as one of their own after his death. Last Friday my friend Dave Jones, a former Reader colleague, e-mailed me asking me to weigh in on James Foley. David had just read Michael Lev’s tribute to Foley in the Tribune as an uncommonly brave and committed journalist who understood the risks and accepted them as the price to be paid for doing work that must be done....

Kevin Morby opens his new album with “Come to Me Now,” an oozing ballad that accompanies his pinched singing with an old pump organ and a sparse, shuffling beat. He told NPR Music that it’s one of several tunes on City Music (Dead Oceans) told from the perspective of a reclusive elderly woman named Mabel who hides from the sun—and, by extension, from life. He rejects that spirit repeatedly here with songs that celebrate the energy and variety of city living, and he’s admitted channeling influences such as Patti Smith and Lou Reed—his drawl has a marked Reed influence, and the guitars that he and Meg Duffy play cleave to the strum-heavy sound of the Velvet Underground....

Earlier this year, overachieving local garage rocker Alex White was elected vice president of the Chicago chapter of the Recording Academy; more formally known as the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, it’s the organization that awards the Grammys. Something else the academy does is encourage conversations between young musicians and their influences, and White has decided to take that aspect of the job into her own hands. Since 2011 she’s been in touch with her drumming idol Lee Graziano, best known from his stints in iconic Chicago garage band the American Breed (“Bend Me, Shape Me,” “Step Out of Your Mind”) and an early version of Chaka Khan-fronted funk outfit Rufus (who had a huge hit after he left with “Tell Me Something Good”)....

The Morning News The Tournament of Books Rooster: the only March trophy that matters One of the great things about the NCAA men’s basketball tournament is that it’s inspired lots of other tournaments for people who, like me, don’t give a shit about college basketball. (I blame this on having attended Northwestern.) Now we too can have the joy of drawing up brackets and picking out our favorite, no, wait, our favorite favorite thing from 64 63 other similar things, and then seeing our hopes crushed multiple times....

New York-based dancer Miguel Gutierrez’s latest manifesto against monoconceptual art, Heavens What Have I Done, says to hell with minimalism’s slick appeal. Gutierrez’s aesthetic dispenses with neat, simple, conveniently inscrutable ideas. With his love of grand spectacle and disguise, he’s more like the Wizard of Oz. But unlike the wizard, for whom exposure means the gig is up, Gutierrez willingly trots out the nitty-gritty secrets of his art. In white pancake makeup, a lipstick rosebud mouth, and fake eyelashes, he intermittently chucks paraphernalia from a suitcase and strips to pull on the rest of his costume, while rattling through a beguilingly self-conscious, self-doubting, self-loathing monologue, which doubles as an origin myth for a 40-year-old dilettante-cum-West Village hipster....

In my capsule review, I describe the found-footage documentary Propaganda (which screens at the Gene Siskel Film Center tomorrow at 5:30 PM and on Tuesday at 8:30 PM) as “a provocative thought experiment,” which is another way of saying I enjoyed reflecting on the movie more than I enjoyed watching it. Propaganda is presented as a North Korean “educational video” about the evils of western capitalist societies. Crude-looking and blunt in its narration, it contains no winks to the audience hinting that it’s a forgery....

Let Sleeping Corpses Lie Among the mass of Halloween-related revival screenings hitting the city this week, the lone zombie feature—aside from those showing as part of the Music Box of Horrors—is Zombie 4: After Death, the conveniently titled 1989 Italian film that doesn’t actually have anything to do with the Zombi franchise. Zombie movies are a fixture of Halloween programming, so it’s kinda surprising that barely any are playing in the city, especially as theaters like the Logan and Music Box get into the season....

There was no obvious moment when the torch passed during host Jeremy Scahill’s interview with Seymour Hersh on a recent live episode of Intercepted, but it wasn’t difficult to imagine one. Raised by activist Catholic parents, Scahill took to political agitation himself at a young age, notably working as a student organizer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison before dropping out in 1995. He hitchhiked east and spent a year working with the radical anti-war ex-priest Philip Berrigan at a religious community in Baltimore....

On behalf of working stiffs everywhere, I’d like to thank Oprah Winfrey for saving us from having Andrew Puzder as our secretary of labor for the next four years. It was bad enough that Trump had nominated a labor secretary who had vehemently opposed raising the minimum wage, once joked about hiring “no more people behind the counter unless they have all their teeth,” and ran commercials for Carl’s Jr. that featured scantily clad women chomping down on big juicy hamburgers like they were—well, you can figure that out....

In 2007 a group of aldermen began talking about banning plastic bags, saying they were tired of getting nagged about bags flapping in trees and clogging sewer drains—not to mention ending up in the lake. Then Mayor Daley and retailers told them they were going to put stores out of business. Nobody likes being known as a jobs killer, so aldermen passed a weak law requiring that big stores offer bag recycling....

I’m not an especially fervent advocate of blues harmonica, but I do love the greats—both the Sonny Boy Williamsons, Big Walter Horton, much of Charlie Musselwhite‘s innovative output. But for me no one compares to Little Walter (aka Louisiana native Marion Walter Jacobs), who arrived in Chicago as a teenager in 1945 and quickly immersed himself in the city’s bustling scene, helping to establish the sound of urban blues that would soon become one of the most important influences on rock ‘n’ roll....

Dustin Park Nandini Khaund’s Reign in Blood cocktail Two months ago Nandini Khaund made a cocktail with pig’s blood for the Reader‘s Cocktail Challenge (she’d been challenged by Kristin Wolfel of the Charleston). After the video was posted online, the Huffington Post picked it up and it went viral. “It was a hard thing to live down for a little bit,” said Khaund, who’s a cofounder of the app Craft Cocktail and blog craftcocktailrules....

Billy Branch has been paying tribute to elder statesmen of the blues for so long that he’s become one himself. Born in 1951 in Great Lakes, Illinois, just north of Chicago, he grew up in California, returning in 1969 to attend college at the new urban campus of the University of Illinois. He’d been toying with a harmonica since childhood, and that year he finally found the inspiration to pursue it as a career: he attended a ten-hour free concert in Grant Park called “Bringing the Blues Back Home,” copresented by songwriter, bassist, and producer Willie Dixon and featuring such harmonica maestros as Junior Wells and Big Walter Horton....

South Korean writer-director Hong Sang-soo sparked a minor scandal in 2016 when tabloid journalists reported he’d been having an extramarital affair with actress Kim Min-hee. Hong admitted to the affair in early 2017 at the Berlin film festival, where he premiered On the Beach at Night Alone; the film stars Kim as an actress who self-destructs after breaking off an affair with a married director. Hong and Kim seemed to be getting the last laugh at the scandalmongers (in real life the pair hadn’t split up), but they were just getting started....

You’d think that anybody with the nerve to write a play about a satanic babysitter would at least have the elementary decency to make it a comedy. This isn’t a comedy. It’s an absolutely serious melodrama by Swiss-born playwright Lukas Bärfuss, translated from the German by Neil Blackadder for Theatre Y. Parents Vera (Katie Stimpson) and Michael (Eric K. Roberts) have joint custody over a seven-year-old. Both are dead set on heading out of town this weekend, lovely Vera to Málaga in the south of Spain for tryst time with Michael’s replacement, gawky hearing-aid inventor Michael to Innsbruck alone for what he calls, huffily, “the biggest ear conference in the world....

When Noname dropped Telefone a year ago, she proved herself a distinctive, thoughtful talent capable of balancing intellect and intimacy—two qualities I generally don’t associate with Lollapalooza. The mixtape’s quiet effervescence and limber, soul-influenced sound quickly made Noname one of the most sought-after artists in Chicago, though, so of course Lollapalooza’s bookers came calling. The festival has the pull to get almost anyone it wants, and there’s no question Noname is worthy—easily among the best acts on this year’s bill, as vital and relevant musically as Chance the Rapper or Lorde....