I realize that to some, Electric Light Orchestra epitomize the overblown excess of the 70s; in their heyday they delved into disco, synthesizers, huge anthems, giant prop spaceships, and yes, white-boy Afros. Personally, I find this all very charming—and much more fun and stylish than today’s meaningless and overindulgent pop—but once you get down to the nuts and bolts of ELO, it all really comes down the songs. ELO svengali Jeff Lynne learned the songwriting trade in the 60s by hashing it out in R&B bands in his industrial hometown of Birmingham, England, before joining forces with the Nightriders in 1966....

Courtesy Joe Fournier Joe Fournier’s cartoons for the Tribune challenge readers to go beyond the surface. “It confuses the hell out of people when I don’t choose a side,” he says. Joe Fournier is one of two cartoonists who appear regularly on the editorial pages of the Tribune, a newspaper that for a long time had no editorial cartoonist at all. But one reason he’s there is that he works cheap....

Luca Cimarusti, Reader music listings coordinator The ever-so-slight possibility of a Pantera reunion In an interview with Matt Pinfield a couple weeks ago, former Pantera front man Phil Anselmo said that he’s hoping to reconcile with drummer Vinnie Paul and get the band back together for a reunion, with Black Label Society goofball Zakk Wylde filling in for the deceased Dimebag Darrell. While this sounds like the worst idea ever, it would probably be kind of awesome too....

The Rocky Horror Picture Show must feature one of the most famous curtains in movie history. Announcing the start of The Blue Angel yesterday, the rising red curtain in the main theater of the Music Box took on a certain risque quality—it was as though the screen were performing a striptease for the audience, creating anticipation for the burlesque numbers Marlene Dietrich would perform in the film. Of course, a movie house doesn’t need to show The Blue Angel (or Gypsy or The Rocky Horror Picture Show) for a curtain to trigger this association....

Kurt Braunohler goes above and beyond to get his jokes out there. At his shows and on his website, Braunohler polls his audience for his next big idea. For instance, which is a funnier billboard post: “Hello, my name is Board, Bill” or “Happy Birthday, Brian! (Giant Brian, not regular Brian)”? Recently the comic addedhis own octagonal retort to a stop sign in his neighborhood (“No YOU stop!”), and last March he crowdfunded enough money to have the message “How do I land?...

Would it surprise you to learn that the food at Level 257, a gargantuan Pac-Man-themed Dave & Busters-style arcade-slash-bowling alley-slash-restaurant at Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg, isn’t very good? How do you like the sound of a “Filet Mig-nom,” an unpronounceable $34 steak served with a Donkey Kong barrel potato? For clarity, a DK barrel potato is a spud that’s been impregnated with a squirt of mashed potatoes, a sort of Frankenstein version of a twice-baked potato, except with not enough of the good, buttery filling....

If American listeners know about British singer Peter Perrett, it’s probably from the 1978 classic “Another Girl, Another Planet,” a brilliant pop tune covered by the likes of the Replacements. In England Perrett’s band the Only Ones, who originally cut the song, were would-be stars who made three albums before Perrett flamed out in the early 80s while fighting heroin addiction. He got his shit together to make a 1996 with a band called the One, and over the past few years he’s been involved in occasional Only Ones reunion shows in Europe....

Update 12/21: That was no temporary blip at Redmoon Theater last week: the company announced Monday that it has closed its doors, after 25 years in which it grew from a Logan Square puppet studio to a high-profile producer of massive, free, urban spectacles. And nobody seems to be at home at Redmoon Central. Midweek calls to the office and box office in the company’s Pilsen home went to voice mail; the online box office deflected would-be ticket buyers....

When battle lines were drawn in Charlottesville, standing among the white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and Ku Klux Klan members (“some very fine people,” according to President Donald Trump) were men brandishing shields bearing the image of an ax bundled with wooden rods—a symbol of fascism. That weekend’s tragic events, which swirled around a “Unite the Right” rally against the city’s decision to remove a public Confederate statue, reminded Northwestern University history professor Bill Savage of the disturbing fact that there’s a 2,000-year-old Roman pillar on Chicago’s lakefront, donated to the city by fascist dictator Benito Mussolini....

shutterstock Talking on the phone is the worst—can you blame these guys for texting? A man of a certain age confides: What brought on my query was a passage in the New Yorker review of a new movie, Men, Women & Children, whose theme, says critic David Denby, is that “our obsession with screens and devices has erased our ability to get to know one another.” Denby—who shares this concern—offers a moment from his private life: “A parent I know, grounding his teen-age daughter, took away her texting privileges for a week but allowed her to use the house landline....

Leo Schwartz and DC Cathro’s musical is a title in search of a show. A mildly campy spoof of The Book of Mormon, this 75-minute one-act focuses on two young Mormon men in contemporary Los Angeles going door to door to convert people to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. When the mismatched missionaries, devout Elder Braithwaite and doubtful Elder Shumway, show up at the home of a lady who appears—and claims—to be legendary Broadway diva Ethel Merman, she presumes they are raising money for their church and invites them in....

Courtesy International Voices Project Egyptian playwright Ahmed Serag I learned a lesson from last year’s installment of the International Voices Project, even though I didn’t attend. The IVP produces an annual festival of staged readings that highlights works by playwrights from outside the English-speaking world—Germany to Japan, Egypt to Catalonia. The roster for 2013 included Noise in the Waters by Italy’s Marco Martinelli and Hamlet Is Dead. No Gravity. by Ewald Palmetshofer of Austria....

When cartoonist Scott Stantis makes fun of Donald Trump he hears from angry readers who want to know why he never makes fun of the Democrats. The fact he does—he repeatedly whacked Hillary Clinton before last November’s election—makes no difference to these readers. Yesterday doesn’t peddle much influence in American politics. I got to know Stantis in 2001 when I wrote a column about the ways editorial cartoonists responded to 9/11....

Tony Adler stepped down as the Reader‘s senior theater critic last month. He was an institution, having spent the better part of his career here, and his exit leaves behind a gap that the cultural community at large will have a hard time restoring. He joins Peter Margasak and J.R. Jones on the list of longtime arts writers at the paper to have left recently. In defiance of time’s passing, the humble reviewer will do things like write a 7,000-word feature on Beau O’Reilly and Jenny Magnus, which Adler did in a 1994 issue of the Reader....

Decease, I Insist: A Funerarial Comedy Near the end of Mass St. Productions’ hour-long, death-centric sketch comedy show, a dull bar mitzvah peps up when octogenarian DJ Yaya arrives, cranking the EDM and reminiscing about how hard she partied while Nazis decimated her hometown, her only dream to become a “4.5-star DJ on Yelp.” It’s appalling, and appallingly funny, and one of the rare moments when this five-person ensemble sticks its collective neck out....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Tuesday, January 31, 2016. Obama’s first post-White House political move is to endorse an alderman Former president Barack Obama made his first political move since leaving the White House January 20 by endorsing Fourth Ward alderman Sophia King in a special election. “Michelle and I have known Sophia many years as a leader dedicated to improving her community. Over the years, Sophia has worked to make neighborhood schools and communities better,” Obama said in a statement....

Over a country-flavored lope, the Shins’ James Mercer looks back at his youth on “Mildenhall,” a song from the recent Heartworms (Aural Apothecary/Columbia). It’s the second Shins album since Mercer ditched the folks he started the band with nearly two decades ago, and the tune’s autobiographical intimacy—it’s a military brat’s recollections of how music came into his life—is at once charming and a bit dissonant. Mercer remembers his father teaching him some basic chords and then sings, “And that’s how we get to where we are now”—now being the present, when he fronts a band of hired guns making meticulously produced pop music....

Yesterday, fledgling local four-piece Clearance dropped what basically amounts to a compilation tape of the band’s entire output, dating all the way back to 2013. Comprised of a pair of seven-inch EPs, the “Carte Blanche Plus One” single, and a number of unreleased tracks, Catalogue Nos.—released via Unsatisfied Records—is a treatment in lo-fi, jangly indie rock, complemented by a hint of the infectious slacker attitude that made the mid-90s such a blase blast....

Michael Gebert Frog gigging on the golf course Foraging for upscale restaurants conjures up an image of delicate flora being found in forests or fields, and then turned into fey little green things applied with tweezers to artful dishes. It does not, to most city-dwelling sophisticates, suggest stabbing things in the night with a big pointy pitchfork. But for Iliana Regan, of Lincoln Square’s Michelin-starred Elizabeth, foraging is as much about collecting fauna like frogs as it is delicate flora like milkweed pods or Queen Anne’s lace....

Courtesy Anne de Mare “It’s an enormous thing to be trusted with someone’s story,” says documentarian Anne de Mare. Did you know? Chicago Public Schools classifies about 19,000 of its students as homeless. CPS has appointed two employees per school—teachers, secretaries, even principals—as “homeless liaisons” responsible for keeping an eye on these kids and helping them survive. In August, during a half-day seminar for its 1,200 homeless liaisons, CPS showed them scenes and outtakes from a new documentary, The Homestretch, about homeless teenagers in Chicago....