Little Brown On February 11, 1910, an unusually snowy night for southeastern England, a baby girl is born with her umbilical cord wrapped around her neck. The roads are impassable; the doctor has still not arrived. She dies. But wait! On February 11, 1910, an unusually snowy night for southeastern England, a baby girl is born with her umbilical cord wrapped around her neck. Fortunately the doctor, armed with surgical scissors, was able to make it out before the roads were blocked....

Chandler West/Sun-Times Media Look on the bright side, Chicago—in Tuesday’s primary, voters showed their utter disgust with Mayor Rahm’s policies . . . in a roundabout way. In my ceaseless search for good news, I’m declaring yesterday’s primary election a massive defeat for Mayor Emanuel. So I’m probably being delusional as I scrape for scraps of good news. But it was closer than expected. Jay Travis, the challenger, pulled just more than 47 percent of the vote....

Released on a series of tapes in 2009, PC Worship’s earliest material was dominated by heady, tripped-out, psych-folk drones that spanned up to 15 minutes in length. Employing cellos, bowed saws, and clarinets, the project, led by Brooklyn’s Justin Frye, was rooted in eerie and hypnotic soundscapes, a far cry from the sleazy noise-rock perfection of this month’s Buried Wish (Northern Spy Records). Written by Frye and recorded with a cast of some of New York’s freakiest collaborators—including monster Liturgy and Guardian Alien drummer Greg Fox and Dreebs member and Jordonna mastermind Jordan Bernstein—Buried Wish revels in the glorious moments of the late 80s and early 90s when noise rock started edging into pop territory....

On Tuesday night, after a three-year wait in a refugee camp, prolonged by ten days by President Donald Trump’s executive order that temporarily banned entry to the United States to refugees and nationals of seven mostly Islamic countries, three Syrian refugees, Baraa, Abdulmajeed, and their 16-month-old daughter finally arrived in Chicago. Their flight landed on schedule, at 5:50 PM, and they cleared customs just before 7 PM. Baraa’s parents and siblings were waiting for them; the hugging started even before they’d cleared the barrier that blocked the door to customs....

The Beauty Queen of Leenane Maureen (Jaimelyn Gray) is a middle-aged woman who lives with her senile elderly mother, Mag (Kate Harris), in a small Irish village. At her breaking point, Maureen has one last chance to be happy, but Mag is determined to stop it. The amazing thing about Irish playwright Martin McDonagh’s 1996 black comedy, here directed by Luda Lopatina Solomon for Bluebird Arts, is how it lulls you into a false sense of security—one minute you’re laughing, the next you’re cringing, as moments of tenderness are quickly outdone by grisly betrayals....

“I had the whole town gaffed up,” Freddy says, “the bartender, the waiter. I was Audie Weiss.” At the time, Freddy had a bad leg. He looked like he could barely stand. By the time Karas caught on, Freddy had already cashed $200,000 in chips. Karas still owed him $800,000. The hustlers who arranged the games were tentative about collecting. Karas got suspicious. Back in Vegas, he started asking around about a guy with glasses and a bad leg who played one pocket....

—Olivia Ortiz­ Olivia Ortiz was 17 when she arrived at the University of Chicago five years ago. She was bright and studious and aspired to live a life of the mind—a common aspiration among U. of C. students. She says now that she was sheltered; she’d attended a mostly female charter school in Phoenix and knew little about boys. She did know a bit about sexual harassment after working one summer at a movie theater....

The Mets could be weary opponents for the Cubs in the National League Championship series, which opens Saturday in New York. Both teams are flying high, but it’s been more than figurative for the Mets. The Cubs’ most formidable starters will be rested and ready to go in the first two games—Jon Lester on Saturday and Jake Arrieta on Sunday. The Mets’ starting rotation is deep, but one of their top pitchers, Jacob deGrom, threw 105 pitches last night, and so won’t be available over the weekend....

History books of the future might not mention this, but the City Council meeting that gave the Obama Presidential Center final permission to build in Jackson Park included votes by Freddy Krueger, Prince, and a trio of giant animal heads. The speakers were ardent, the officials distracted. Whereupon—like a bolt of lightning on a dark and stormy night—rules were suspended, a roll-call vote was taken, and both OPC ordinances were resoundingly passed, 48 to zero....

A lot of the history of brewing is the history of regulatory headaches,” says brewer John Laffler of Off Color. It’s a legacy that continues today: Laffler faced bureaucratic setbacks while brewing QingMing, a collaboration beer with the Field Museum inspired by brewing techniques and ingredients from ancient China. For example, because there’s evidence that hemp was used as a filtration mechanism, Off Color was planning to replicate the technique. “We talked to the feds and they were like, ‘If you get this documentation that all these hemp seeds don’t have any THC [you can do it],’ ” Laffler says....

“The housing market is ridiculously slim for those of us in a chair,” says Tovar, who’s spent months searching for alternative housing while paying more than half of her social security disability income toward rent since the CHA lowered its voucher payouts to her in 2016. Through a series of emergency petitions to CHA and the Department of Housing and Urban Development this past year, Tovar has managed to remain at the Harbor Drive apartment on a month-to-month agreement....

Nostalgia can blind us, so that we remember things as way better than they actually were. Riot Fest capitalizes on that phenomenon year after year by enlisting a handful of bands to play their best-known records front to back. I just went back and listened to all seven of this year’s albums, and I’m here to tell you how they’ve aged—no nostalgic bias allowed. Fear The Record (1982) Sunday 2:25 PM, Rise Stage...

Erasing the Distance, the 12-year-old theater collective that aims to “disarm” the stigma around mental illness, regularly creates two kinds of magic. First, the ensemble concoct eloquent, harrowing scripts from verbatim interviews with people experiencing mental illness, scripts as artful and insightful as any created by well-pedigreed playwrights. Second, they find actors who perform these texts with such grace, candor, and passion it’s difficult to believe they’re acting at all. It’s hard to find more theatrical immediacy on any stage....

Unpacking the life of Jason Molina is no small task. The front man of Magnolia Electric Co. and Songs: Ohia, whose records helped build Bloomington’s Secretly Canadian label into a critical darling, wasn’t just tirelessly prolific—he’d written so many songs he was often unable to recall their titles—but also a notorious teller of tall tales, frequently lying for no conceivable benefit. Chicago writer Erin Osmon, who just published her first book, Jason Molina: Riding With the Ghost, had to work hard to get inside the head of this mysterious character....

On Labor Day weekend, the American independent film industry turns its attention to the Colorado mountain town of Telluride. Rymsza and Marshall had both been on the Sisyphean quest to complete one of the most notoriously unfinished works in the history of American cinema: Orson Welles’s legendary and seemingly cursed production The Other Side of the Wind. Welles started shooting the film in August 1970 and finally completed the start-and-stop production in early 1976....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Monday, July 10, 2017. Will the Illinois Republican Party challenge Republicans who voted for budget deal? A handful of Republican members of the Illinois house went against Governor Bruce Rauner and voted for the Democrats’ spending plan and income tax hike last week. Fifteen GOP representatives voted for the plan the first time, and ten voted to override Rauner’s veto of the bills Thursday....

Kevin Warwick, Reader associate editor Man or Astro-man?, Project Infinity This mostly instrumental band leans hard on a zany shtick that includes whacked-out costumes (space-man getups, radiation ­suits, et cetera) and audio clips prophesying peril from beyond the stars, but those antics have never overshadowed the catalog of sharp surf-rock these weirdos released in the 90s on Estrus and Touch and Go. I recently dug out this 1995 record (in its other­worldly cover, “Direct From Outer Space Itself”) to bask in the over-the-top spring reverb of “Transmissions From Venus” and “Tomorrow Plus X....

Lily Allen, Sheezus (Regal) Sheezus is the first album from English pop singer Lily Allen since 2009’s It’s Not Me, It’s You, where she moved away from the retro ska and dancehall production of her 2006 debut Alright, Still, to dive headfirst into high-gloss electro-pop. It’s also her first album since becoming a wife and mother—and the woman who made her name flaunting a don’t-give-a-fuck attitude and swearing like a sailor is now singing about the joys of feeding babies and staying in at night....

As recent events unfold, a pressing question emerges: Who’s the bigger fraud, Judge Brett Kavanaugh or Governor Bruce Rauner? “I’m not questioning that Dr. Ford may have been sexually assaulted . . . “ Or, as Rauner himself put it: “Boy, I’ve got to tell you, holding up the center has been incredibly hard as governor.” For his first three years as governor, Rauner was able to drag Republican legislators off the cliff with him on his anti-union policies....

AP Photos Cubs rookie Javier Baez has some of us daydreaming about—dare we say it?—winning baseball. I received a text the other night from my friend and colleague Ben Joravsky, and strangely enough it wasn’t about Rahm Emanuel. And after a week in the majors, Baez is striking out more than one of every three times he steps to the plate. I always enjoyed the movie version, starring Robert Redford as Roy Hobbs, the aging rookie with a mysterious past whose talent and grace transforms a team from doomed to triumphant....