When Carolyn Smith saw a for sale sign go up on her block one evening in the fall of 2011, it felt serendipitous. The now 68-year-old was anxiously looking for a new place to live. The landlord of her four-unit apartment building in the city’s Austin neighborhood was in foreclosure and had stopped paying the water bill. That month, she and the other tenants had finally scraped together the money themselves to prevent a shutoff and were planning to withhold rent until the landlord paid them back....

“Bring Your Own Body,” a showcase of historical documents and contemporary art at Columbia College’s Glass Curtain Gallery, aims to highlight self-identified transgender histories as opposed to narratives by those outside the transgender community. In this show, trans artists decide how their community is documented, and they do it through various mediums. The collaged titles within Vargas’s work were pulled from sources at the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, which also provided some of the historical photography of trans individuals presented toward the back of the exhibition, or near the beginning of the time line....

Since tepache tastes like beer, Compton began brainstorming what foods go well with beer; wings and Asian food came to mind. He settled on hot wings with a tepache glaze, served with fried rice cooked in tepache. He considered using the tepache as a marinade, but worried that the bromaline in pineapple—a compound that’s a natural meat tenderizer—would make the meat mushy. Fried rice 1 C long-grain white rice 2 C tepache 4 tsp grape-seed oil 2 oz chorizo verde or similar sausage 1/2 C broccoli florets 1/4 C fresh pineapple 1 T pickled ginger, minced 1 clove garlic, minced 1 scallion, thinly sliced 2 tsp Worcestershire sauce Salt and black pepper to taste...

Wood-burning pizzas! Freshly made pastas! Steaks and seafood and gelato and Nutella! Eataly has so many things to tempt you with, you start to suspect that once it lures in enough humans stuffing their faces, it’ll seal all its doors and blast back to its home planet with a full shipment of livestock. Given all its publicity, it seems hard to imagine Eataly has many secrets, but La Verdure, the vegetable counter, comes closest to being overlooked....

Frank Ockenfels/AMC Our zombie friends and alive friends are back on The Walking Dead. It’s that time of the year, folks: time to curl up on the couch with a blanket and your best guy or girl and start placing bets on how long the shitty new network sitcoms will last. (I’m giving Bad Judge three episodes—prove me wrong, Kate Walsh.) But it’s not all bad—in fact, a few new shows look downright promising—and if it turns out they suck, at least some of our old tried-and-trues are returning....

Courtesy of Kero Kero Bonito’s Facebook page Kero Kero Bonito London electronic-pop outfit Kero Kero Bonito combines J-pop, funk carioca, chiptune, and hip-hop into a constantly shifting, bubbly sound. The three-piece stands as a great example of what bricolage is like in the Tumblr age, allowing people to connect disparate cultures just by clicking a few different hashtags. The Internet also provided Kero Kero Bonito with the tools it needed to form in the first place: according to Dummy magazine two of the band members, Jamie and Gus, found singer-rapper Sarah Bonito after posting a wanted ad for a rapper on a Japanese-expat message board (“We were really interested in Japanese rap,” Gus told Dummy)....

Inexplicably, I haven’t written about Off Color since founders John Laffler and Dave Bleitner got it up and running as a production brewery last summer—I reviewed the Mischief pop-up bar in March 2013, then got an early taste of the hibiscus gose tapped at Northdown’s Lions, Tigers & Beers on June 5. Even my 2013 Best of Chicago write-up (“Best Brewery With a Bright Tank Named ‘Waffles’”) had to be finished before Off Color started shipping bottles....

In a recent interview with Chicago culture and news site These Days, rapper and Pivot Gang cofounder Joseph Chilliams discussed an epiphany he’d had about making music while watching a Louis C.K. special: “I realized that as long as it’s entertaining, it can be about absolutely anything.” Fortunately, he also understands the value of grounding his entertaining self-expression with sincerity and personality. His forthcoming debut, Henry Church—a rough Spanish-to-English translation of Enrique Iglesias’s name—is filled with pop-culture references and mature recollections of Chilliams’s youth in Chicago’s Austin neighborhood, delivered deadpan....

Black! In his unfortunately titled solo show, Michael Washington Brown performs monologues purporting to demonstrate the “distinct differences” and “very definite similarity between Black people from all walks of life.” Well, just four, and all men: a music-loving African-American, a brainy Londoner, a paternal Jamaican, and a generic African, all primarily concerned with local, national, and global disunity among black people. Their musings range from provocative (can a Britisher ever feel “black enough?...

Alshaibi (far left) in American Arab Last night the 21st Chicago Underground Film Festival closed with Usama Alshaibi’s American Arab, a documentary profile of various Arab immigrants and the American-born children of Arab parents. It’s the former Chicagoan’s second personal documentary (after Nice Bombs, from 2006), as well as the least confrontational work this longtime provocateur has made. (For more on his development, check out the conversation we posted last week between Alshaibi and local filmmaker Carlos Jiménez Flores....

Michael Gebert Pecking Order, which closed this weekend I remember talking with some other food writers, a year and a half ago or so, about one of the pressing questions of the day: where were the flops? Things were opening fast and furiously, often in the form of very large and well-funded restaurants on Randolph Street or in Logan Square, and yet nothing ever seemed to close. Nothing old gave up the ghost, nothing new failed to make it....

The Repos Ian’s Party is this weekend, and as usual it has a solid and stacked lineup. There is one huge bummer about this year’s edition, though, and that’s the last-minute cancellation of classic Chicago hardcore band the Repos. I’m not a huge hardcore guy, especially when it’s coming from newer bands, but this four-piece, which originally existed between 2003 and ’08, is an act worth getting excited for. These guys have been popping up every now and again over the past few years to play shows—usually at hardcore fests or at bigger-deal gigs like the Los Crudos reunions—and up until last week were scheduled to headline Ian’s Party on the night of Sat 1/4 at Township....

San Francisco’s mighty, shaggy—and a little bit unnerving—stoner powerhouse Acid King haven’t released a new album since 2015’s landmark Middle of Nowhere, Center of Everywhere (Svart Records). A major lineup shakeup at the end of 2016 put front woman Lori S. back onstage with new drummer Bil Bowman and bassist Rafa Martinez, who played with the band from 2005 through 2008 (and is also half of sludgy metal duo Black Cobra)....

For a year or so now, fourth-wave emo bands such as Modern Baseball and the World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die have been landing on the Billboard charts with a new spin on the second-wave sound that grew out of the 90s midwest scene—rugged bass, interlocking guitars, and inept but endearingly sincere vocals. For fans who grew up seeing the Promise Ring and Braid, shows by these fourth-wave groups can be a way to relive bygone nights sweating it out at VFW halls, but it’s not necessarily about nostalgia for the people putting out the records....

Over the past year or so I’ve noticed a handful of Chicago hip-hop veterans gravitating back to releasing music on physical media after long stints of focusing largely on digital platforms (whether free-download mixtape sites, or on major players such as Spotify and Apple). Perhaps they’re following the example of DJ and Black Pegasus label head Mark Davis. Since starting his company in 2010, he’s completely avoided digital releases, and he’d become known for reissuing obscure local rap recordings on vinyl well before this spring’s launch of a new 7-inch series Seven Sense; he kicked things off with a couple of previously unissued early Common recordings....

It was like Groundhog Day for public education recently, as about 40 or so Chicago parents, students, and activists did pretty much the exact same thing they did at about this time a year ago: headed north to Illinois governor Bruce Rauner’s house to protest his school funding policies. “I try to stay hopeful, but things are getting worse,” says Mary Fahey Hughes, a mother of four CPS students from Beverly who showed up at Rauner’s house on August 2....

Cartoonist and illustrator Rachel Foss, in the past few weeks, was hit by a cab, took a spectacular fall on the ice, and was roofied—as in a stranger dropped Rohypnol in her drink. On Valentine’s Day. Paramedics found Foss passed out in her bathtub, where she’d been angrily eating carrots. That’s quite a streak. But on February 8, the night that “This Was Supposed to Help” opened, it seemed like Foss’s stars were finally aligning....

Bad news for fans of cinema, good writing, and popular culture in general: the Dissolve, Pitchfork Media’s movie site, has gone belly up. “For the past two years—well, two years this Friday—it’s been our pleasure to put up this site, a site founded on and driven by a love for movies, alongside a company with passion and talent for creating thoughtful, important work,” wrote Keith Phipps, the editor-in-chief (and a friend of mine)....

Q I’m an old guy, fast approaching geezerdom. After 45 years of marriage to the same woman, the sex has fallen off to zero. We otherwise have a great and comfortable relationship. If I want any at all these days, the only options are masturbation or professional service providers. I was very nervous the first time I paid for sex. Curiously and surprisingly, considering my Christian upbringing, I didn’t feel at all guilty....

But I want trofie!,” I pouted and figuratively stamped the floor when I saw there was no pasta on the menu at Good Measure, a tight new River North barstaurant from Sophie de Oliveira, a sibling in a Chicago cocktail family dynasty that includes her brother Daniel, spirits-brand manager about town, and sister Jacyara (El Che). Along with her is chef Matt Troost, who’s mounting a comeback after stepping away a year and a half ago from West Town pasteria the Charlatan, which closed three months after his departure....