Similarities to the lead photo in last week’s Lagunitas post are entirely intentional. When I first started getting press releases for Lake View “beer cafe” Beermiscuous, which formally opened on Saturday, I didn’t feel too sanguine about it. I mean, that name! At least the folks who run the place have committed to it: the cafe’s slogan is “Drink around.” Beermiscuous doesn’t have a kitchen, just packaged snacks at the bar, but it allows outside food and maintains a collection of menus from restaurants that will deliver to the cafe—and Gyros on the Spit is just a few doors north on Lincoln....

Michael Gebert In a rare example of people actually getting what they’ve been asking for (for years now), Edzo’s Burger Shop, the beloved Evanston burger stand which has been open only for lunch (so owner Eddie Lakin could have a life) since it opened in 2009, will add dinner service. “We’re finally acquiescing to people’s many requests that, ‘Why aren’t you open at night?’” says Lakin. The Evanston location will stay open until 10 PM starting Tuesday, January 28, and soon after, the Lincoln Park location (which is open till 8 PM currently) will start staying open until midnight on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday....

Last year, in the fog of the morning hustle to get my son to school, I saw something that bolted the day clear: a seven-year-old girl lying on the side of the road, right on the corner of school property, a handful of adults clutched over her. Just before 8 AM, a drunk driver had struck her and her sister on their way to school. Thankfully, they would both recover, but the justified outrage prompted a number of questions about how to address the problem: Erect a streetlight?...

Pity the SC Johnson employees, the 175 poor souls in marketing and sales that are relocating from its global headquarters in Racine, Wisconsin, to a regional office in Chicago that opened last fall. Such a move would normally seem like an indisputable upgrade, a grand opportunity to make a new, exciting life in the big city—but in this case those workers are leaving behind the splendor of a landmark campus largely designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in exchange for leased space in a West Loop high-rise that the notoriously censorious Wright would probably deem conventional at best....

For the past 60 years Joffrey Ballet has been regarded as one of the best ballet companies in the country, and its classical style has always stood out significantly in Chicago, a city where there seems to be a jazz dance studio on every corner. But instead of spending the landmark anniversary reflecting on the historic work that has been performed over six decades, Joffrey instead opens its season with “Millennials,” a show of premiere works choreographed by contemporary ballet’s “next generation” of artists....

Two decades ago Ry Cooder and Nick Gold produced a series of recordings with long-forgotten veterans of Cuban music under the now familiar name “Buena Vista Social Club,” but for me the greatest product of that effort wasn’t the acclaimed all-star band that spent years touring the globe. It was the spin-off recordings from some of that band’s strongest members, among them Ibrahim Ferrer, Compay Segundo, Orland “Cachaíto” Lopez, Omara Portuondo, Manuel Galban, and Eliades Ochoa....

Sun-Times Media Rahm Emanuel speaks at a 2005 press conference with former mayor Richard M. Daley, whose patronage machine had helped send Emanuel to Congress three years earlier. For a few seconds the other day, I thought I’d been transported by a magical time-travel machine to the early 2000s, when Mayor Daley ruled the land. Or, more specifically, to the hundreds of city employees—most of them water or sanitation department workers—dispatched by political bosses Donald Tomczak and Daniel Katalinic to work the precincts for Emanuel in his 2002 congressional campaign....

I first encountered Lea Bertucci’s music when she was playing bass clarinet on the 2014 album L’Onde Souterraine (Telegraph Harp), a series of visceral yet meditative duet improvisations with cellist Leila Bordreuil. The music she’s released since then has revealed a broad and fascinating artistic practice often focused on the acoustics of specific spaces. “Cepheid Variations,” the first of two tracks on her terrific All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (NNA Tapes), was composed for Brooklyn’s Issue Project Room, and features Bordreuil and violist Jeanann Dara, who play striated, long tones rich in ghostly harmonics that Bertucci processes into a haunting collision of overtones and reverberation....

Created by the independent distributor ArtMattan Productions, the African Diaspora Film Festival premiered in New York in 1993 and arrived in Chicago as a touring festival ten years later, thanks mainly to the efforts of Facets Cinematheque programmer Charles Coleman. Like the social migration it’s named after, the fest has always been hard to pin down, and the 12th local edition is no different: the subject matter of the ten features and two shorts screening this week range from the U....

There are plenty of shows, films, and concerts happening this weekend. Here’s some of what we recommend: Fri 8/17-Sun 8/19: Araby follows the life and jobs of an itinerant Brazilian laborer. “Araby is unmistakably contemporary in its fashions, settings, and physical behavior; the similarities to the past seem found rather than manufactured,” writes Reader critic Ben Sachs. João Dumans and Affonso Uchoa directed. In Portuguese with subtitles. 97 min. Various times, Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N....

You might already know that Chicago’s premier Celtic-punk band the Tossers—our own south-side Pogues kin who predate fellow travelers like the Dropkick Murphys and Flogging Molly by several years—put on a rip-roaring Saint Patty’s Day show every year at Metro, and that they’ve been around nearly a quarter century now, honing their showmanship over countless live gigs. But you might not know that they just dropped Smash the Windows (Victory), their first record since 2013’s The Emerald City and only their fifth studio album overall....

Ida Now in its fourth week at the Music Box Theatre, Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida not only takes place in early-60s Poland, but it looks like it was made then too. The jazz musician who hitches a ride with the title character and her aunt seems to have stepped out of Andrzej Wajda’s Innocent Sorcerers (which screened last weekend at the Siskel Film Center as part of the “Masterpieces of Polish Cinema” series)....

Young Thug is the latest in a long line of idiosyncratic mixtape rappers to inspire a level of obsession on the rap Internet that approaches the cultic. Like many objects of hip-hop fascination for hip-hop’s early adopters—Gucci Mane, Lil B, the godfather Lil Wayne—Thug is a weirdo who luxuriates in his weirdness. His latest mixtape, January’s Black Portland (featuring Bloody Jay), is a gloriously twitchy lo-fi jumble of southern trap, Future-style sing-rapping, noisy synth-pop, and the 50 or so different voices that Thug has in his repertoire and frequently switches between with little apparent rhyme or reason....

Paul Boucher A final majestic swing by Adam Dunn in the ninth last night. Twelve days ago, when Adam Dunn was traded to the A’s, White Sox fans assumed they’d seen the last of him—but he’s back in town this week for a final farewell. Oakland, struggling for a playoff spot, arrived Monday for a four-game series. The series concludes this afternoon, but with lefty Chris Sale pitching for the Sox today, Dunn almost certainly will start the game on the bench....

The past year has yielded numerous contenders for this honor. Finding Vivian Maier profiled the reclusive street photographer whose stubborn pursuit of her art epitomized the city almost as much as the random Chicagoans she captured on film. The Golden Age of Wild Chicago, compiled from the long-running WTTW show, provided a late-80s time capsule of local eccentrics and offbeat enterprises. Even Divergent, the dippy dystopian blockbuster adapted from Veronica Roth’s young-adult novel, offered a fascinating postapocalyptic vision of the city, where teenagers get their kicks wire-gliding between decrepit skyscrapers....

The day before their son, Juneau, was born, Eula Biss and her husband, John Bresland, walked to the end of the pier at Rogers Beach, across the street from their apartment on Eastlake Terrace. It was the first warm day of March. Biss was in labor. They knew their lives were about to change dramatically. So she started doing research. Biss ended up skipping Juneau’s first hep B vaccine, not because the doctor told her to, but because she was still uncertain....

Almost a year ago I talked with chef Diana Davila and Mark Robertson, co-owner of a few Uptown bars, about Cantina de la Granja, an ambitious farm-to-table Mexican restaurant that would have an impressively large rooftop garden (1,400 square feet) and a preservation kitchen, as well as a commitment to using local foods in a Mexican-midwestern fusion way. I’ve wondered since then whatever became of the idea, but now I know: it has an opening date, and also a name change....

Welcome to Flopcorn, where Reader writers and contributors pay tribute to our very favorite bad movies. In this installment, staff writer Leor Galil tries to fathom the works of Neil Breen. In Twisted Pair, Breen plays twins Cade and Cale. During their childhood, they were kidnapped by a mysterious being who combines their DNA with artificial intelligence for some reason. Cade and Cale hone their powers with this mysterious creature, which briefly appears in the form of a rotund, animated 3D head that looks like it was made for a Windows screen saver in the 90s....

Tal Rosenberg, Reader digital content editor CDs I mostly skew toward vinyl and MP3s, but I recently unearthed my CD collection after moving, and it’s been a blast to revisit the format. Also, I popped into Reckless, and apparently used CDs (most of which are in really good condition) are like four bucks now. They’re practically giving these things away! Dave Mata, DJ with Impala Sound Champions and Soul Summit Chicago...

An estimated 40,000 people, dogs, cats, and dinosaurs gathered in Grant Park on Saturday—a seasonably appropriate Earth Day—to march to the Field Museum to show their support for science: the belief in it, the funding for it, and its spirit of openness and curiosity, all things that have been denied by members of the current administration. It was also an opportunity to make some excellent protest signs, which, arguably, has become the great public art form of our time....