UIC Walkout & Rally The student-led rally hopes to bring together a large group of people, regardless of race, gender, or political affiliation, to unite against president-elect Donald Trump. Participants are encouraged to walk out of classrooms or workplaces and stand together. Fri 1/20, 2:30-4:30 PM, University of Illinois at Chicago Quad, 1200 W. Harrison. Credit: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP Photos Shake It Up for Justice Latino Union of Chicago and Centro de Trabajadores Unidos are holding a joint fund-raiser to raise workplace standards for immigrant workers in Chicago and surrounding suburbs....

Meatbodies This week LA garage outfit Meatbodies released their debut record on In the Red and are already grinding on the road for it, playing two shows in town tonight. The band, fronted by Chad Ubovich, who has done time in Mikal Cronin’s live band and plays in the Ty Segall side project Fuzz, takes the west coast garage-rock vibe and makes it heavy as hell by adding seriously thick guitar tones, over-the-top drumming, and what I imagine are pounds of weed....

There’s a new charcoal-burning grill next to the flattop at the Diner Grill, but each time I’ve been by it’s been cold. Perhaps it’s just as well given the flammable nature of the 78-year-old Lakeview institution. Late-night louts waited nearly a year and a half for it to reopen after the Christmas Eve fire that in 2016 gutted one of the two vaulted streetcars that housed the grill, counter, and its emerald-green upholstered stools....

During the Pitchfork Music Festival, local nonprofit writing and tutoring center 826 Chicago sends a handful of students to Union Park to interview some of the performers as part of a music-writing workshop called “The Rest Is Noise.” I got the chance to serve as one of the volunteers for this outing, and it was a pleasure to watch these teenage journalists get a scope of the festival, kick back during the performances, and chat up musicians....

Zion Evangelical Lutheran, at 19th and Peoria in Pilsen, is a nice old church, made of gently worn red brick. It has a 90-foot-tall bell tower, a heavy wooden front door, and its name carved on the facade in old-fashioned German Gothic script. All it’s missing, really, are stained glass windows, an altar, pews, and back and side walls. If you look through the iron grates on either side of the main wall, you’ll see a well-kept lawn, interspersed with a few trees and piles of stone that once made up the building’s foundation....

Immigrants enrich every square inch of Chicago’s food culture—including my grimy little kitchen. Though I’m a garden-variety mixed honky from Texas, my favorite recipes are all Indian and Thai. I live in Edgewater, a short hop from two of the city’s densest concentrations of international groceries: the Indo-Pak strip along Devon and the cluster of Southeast Asian shops around Argyle. I learned to feed myself in college from the Hare Krishnas who catered for the student vegetarian club, and a couple years ago I started working my way through the lovingly researched cookbooks of part-time Chicagoan Leela Punyaratabandhu....

In his potent new play for Colectivo el Pozo, Chicago playwright Raúl Dorantes shows a knack for extracting a kind of ironic mythic resonance from thorny cultural narratives about immigration, creating a destabilizing, impish, mystifying 70 minutes. In this magical, menacing world, the gods of nearly every immigrant group die on their journey to America. The lone exception is the ancient Mesoamerican bat god Camazotz—a blood-feeding, cave-dwelling creature who plays a particularly frightening role in the Kiche creation saga Popol Vuh—who’s arrived in Chicago undocumented....

Bo Burnham’s stunning indie comedy Eighth Grade opens with a YouTube advice video shot by shy 13-year-old Kayla (Elsie Fisher) on her laptop. Her topic is “being yourself,” but it contrasts with her wish to be anyone else. She stumbles over her words, stopping and starting, professing how important it is to be who you really are even though she has no idea who she is yet. Burnham showcases universal eighth-grade experiences: there are shots of kids messing with their braces, huffing highlighters, and suffering romantic crushes....

This July marks the two-year anniversary of Filmfront, a cine club and artists’ studio in Pilsen. Located at 1740 W. 18th (just a block and a half from the 18th Street Pink Line station), the space offers free screenings, reading groups, and art exhibitions. Filmfront will commemorate its second birthday with the release of a 24-page monograph called Film Food Footnotes. The book, according to cofounder and programmer Malia Haines-Stewart, combines production stills, research notes, and excerpts of film dialogue that relate to instances in movies where people discuss food....

When Tiruwerk was seven years old, the police came to her home in Khartoum, Sudan, and took her father away. “They sent him away for two weeks and they beat him a lot of times,” she wrote in the memoir I Remember . . . published through 826Chi. “I said that I wished that I was beaten and not my lovely daddy!” Blair Brettschneider (now the executive director) started the organization in 2011 after working with a local refugee resettlement agency and realizing that teenage girls in particular could benefit from special attention....

Chicago based hip-hop media company iLLANOiZE is hosting the third installment of its Let’s Get Social event series, a music showcase featuring rising hip-hop and R&B artists from across Chicagoland. The Let’s Get Social series is the brainchild of hip-hop artist Bekoe, the founder of iLLANOiZE. Bekoe launched iLLANOiZE in 2012 with the clothing line iLLANOiZE Apparel, a brand inspired by the meteoric rise of the Chicago hip-hop scene. It was with this in mind that Bekoe began the Let’s Get Social music showcase....

Some writers write to explain. Others write to entertain, Isaac Gomez, the 27-year-old author of La Ruta, now receiving its world premiere at the Steppenwolf Theatre, writes because he can’t not write; writing is how he finds words for as yet unnamed, unexpressed ideas and feelings. Gomez has been working on La Ruta sporadically since his senior year of college. “It was my first formal play,” he says. It’s set on the U....

A few days ago reedist, bandleader, and composer Ken Vandermark announced the formation of his own record label, Audiographic. The move follows on the heels of similar projects by two of his collaborators: drummer Tim Daisy’s Relay Recordings and saxophonist Dave Rempis’s Aerophonic Records. The new imprint will release new recordings in editions of 500, on LP and/or CD, as with the first two releases (out yesterday), both by Vandermark’s latest large band, Audio One—Vandermark, Daisy, Rempis, vibist Jason Adasiewicz, trombonist Jeb Bishop, cornetist Josh Berman, bassist Nick Macri, saxophonist Nick Mazzarella, violist Jen Paulson, and reedist Mars Williams....

NOEL CELIS/AFP/GETTY IMAGES Obama catches flak for keeping troops home. Articles in Tuesday’s Tribune and New York Times dwell on President Obama’s troubles defending a nonbellicose foreign policy, with the Times saying that the president, while visiting the Philippines, “lashed out at those he said reflexively call for the use of force.” The Times described Obama as “visibly frustrated” as he complained that his critics “had failed to learn the lessons of the Iraq war....

AP Photo/Jeff Chiu White Sox manager Robin Ventura kicks up a fuss in San Francisco yesterday about an overturned call at home plate. I haven’t seen Robin Ventura this angry since he charged Nolan Ryan 21 years ago. That’s when 7.13 entered the game. Baseball adopted the rule over the winter to cut down on collisions ​​at the plate. It stipulates that a runner who goes out of his way to knock over a catcher will be called out....

Dan O’Sullivan admits that he had a “lame-ass excuse” for skipping the protests on January 28 at O’Hare International Airport over President Trump’s executive order on immigration: household chores. But as he quietly folded laundry at his Chicago apartment, the journalist and self-described “idiot with a keyboard” sparked a viral #DeleteUber campaign on social media that doubled as a possible blueprint to those who want to resist Trump by putting pressure on corporations that associate with the president and his administration....

Q: This woman has gone down on me (I’m a man) more than half a dozen times in the last three months. Each time seems to be better than the previous! She does not want reciprocation. She has also turned down all my offers for intercourse. As far as I know, she is heterosexual just like me. What’s with that? I am getting a bit frustrated. Also, without going all the way, am I considered a friend with benefits?...

Since 2010, Brooklyn-via-Toronto label Orchid Tapes has been releasing albums by young songwriters whose delightfully warm material exudes an intimacy I usually associate with bedroom acts. I don’t entirely endorse the use of “bedroom pop” to describe Orchid Tapes’ catalog, as the term doesn’t speak to some of the musicians’ flair for experimentation—take Three Love Songs, the proper full-length debut by Ricky Eat Acid (aka Sam Ray), on which Ray samples a cover of Drake’s “Take Care” and drops it on a house track that’s sandwiched between a couple lovely ambient numbers....

Judging from the memorial to fallen cyclist Louis Ray Smith at the East Garfield Park crash site, the 56-year-old was beloved. On Homan Avenue about 200 feet south of the roaring Lake Street elevated train, relatives and friends planted red-white-and-blue artificial flowers in the grass and burned memorial candles on the curb. A colorful lei and a stuffed beagle with “Snoop” and “Smooth,” the nicknames of friends, written in marker on its fur, are tied to a tree....

David Campigotto seemed unnerved that I was taking my cassoulet to go. “If you cover the beans while they’re hot it can make them pass out,” he told me, insisting I leave the lids ajar on the two 32-ounce plastic deli cups he had carefully packed with sausage, pork rib and duck leg confit, creamy white haricots lingots, and a heart-stopping amount of fat. “You can make a cassoulet out of whatever you want,” he said....