Much has been written about the Cursed Cubs—maybe too much. Apparently only supernatural causes can be responsible for more than a century of World Series futility. Forget bad management, cheap and shortsighted owners, superstition, and maybe, just maybe, a fan base that actually enjoys the whole cursed lovable losers myth and wouldn’t know what the hell to do if the Cubs suddenly became winners. Look what happened to the Red Sox post 2004 after they broke the curse Babe Ruth allegedly placed on them after he was sold to the Yankees....

“You talk about the Chicago imagists,” notes Scottish painter Peter Doig. “I’m not sure that I see Chicago in their work, really. I think if you’re from Chicago you do. . . . The reason why their work is of interest to others is because it transcends that place. That place represents many places to other people.” Coming near the end of Leslie Buchbinder’s new documentary, Hairy Who & The Chicago Imagists, a careful survey of our local art scene from the 50s through the 80s, Doig’s remarks startled me because I’d been watching the entire movie from my own narrow perspective as a longtime Chicagoan....

“There are no two words in the English language more harmful than good job,” declares Terence Fletcher, the viciously demanding jazz instructor in Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash. This sentiment doesn’t seem to have registered with critics, though, because Whiplash is one of the best-reviewed films of 2014. The lobby poster is chockablock with glowing blurbs and studded with the sort of gerunds that make publicists tremble: exhilarating . . . astounding ....

Thursday night WTTW aired an hour-long documentary, My Neighborhood: Pilsen, the centerpiece of a multimedia project on a part of Chicago that’s preoccupied with something the documentary barely mentioned. And with that oblique observation the program abandoned the subject. My Neighborhood: Pilsen is a mosaic, a look at Pilsen that doesn’t linger on anything and neither imposes nor extracts any particular point of view beyond the celebratory. “We’re survivors,” said someone at the start, though of what wasn’t made clear....

For Wyatt Cenac, the best stand-up material comes from stepping out of his front door, heading down the familiar way, and observing the hypergentrifying world around him. On last year’s Netflix-released comedy special Wyatt Cenac: Brooklyn the former Daily Show With Jon Stewart correspondent settles into a pair of shows at Park Slope’s Union Hall to pretty much take the audience sitting in front of him to task. But Cenac is as cool as they come when he’s riffing, for example, about how out of whack the very existence of an artisanal mayonnaise retailer makes Brooklyn appear....

This Austin trio unleashed its second full-length, Pagan Science (RidingEasy Records), last fall to accolades from aficionados of heavy stoner-doom: it’s a solid 40 minutes of slightly hooky riffing with a vintage texture that pulls listeners away from the bongwater-scented pillows in their old custom vans and up toward the stars. Fans of sinister occult rock should warm right up to “Black Eyed Gods” and “Drug From the Banks,” as well as to the monkish incantatory chants that open up “Byzantine....

Writing in the Reader in 1991, Jonathan Rosenbaum compared Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever to “a kind of ‘living newspaper,’ where front-page stories exist in proximity to one another without necessarily linking up, and where it’s left to the audience to make some of the vital connections (or not, as the case may be).” This description fairly summarizes much of Lee’s work, for better and for worse. On the one hand, his movies are almost always timely and ambitious; on the other, his usual insistence on confronting as much of the zeitgeist as possible can make them feel overweening and rushed....

SUN-TIMES PRINT COLLECTION Judge Richard Posner in 2011. When issues as serious as national security and government secrecy are at stake, a little levity can be a tonic. The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals provided it on Monday. Posner is renowned for his brilliance and notorious for his impatience. He graduated first in his class at Harvard Law in 1962. Now 75, he’s been on the Seventh Circuit for 33 years....

A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. Can, “Turtles Have Short Legs” Much of the music I find restorative is frankly ugly and unpleasant (see above). But I’m confident that all humans can enjoy the jaunty, playful riffs, goofy lyrics, and irresistibly frisky drumming in this 1971 Can single. We miss you, Jaki. Willie Nelson, God’s Problem Child Ah, Willie, I can’t stop listening to your new record....

“I don’t need to disparage most electronic music, but in a lot of it, people begin by putting a kick drum on every single beat,” Nelson Bean says. “I can’t do that. I try and make it a little bit slinkier.” Impossible World by Black Hat Black Hat’s new Impossible World, Bean’s second release on Hausu Mountain, embraces that sense of isolation; it sounds like it’s intended not for a club but rather for the space between your eyes and the back of your head....

Last September, chef John Tesar threw a short, Trump-toned Twitter tantrum about Chicago chef Timothy Cottini. The restaurateur, former Top Chef contestant, and “most hated chef in Dallas” (according to a D Magazine story) accused Cottini of attempting to rip off the name, logo, and concept of Tesar’s steak house, Knife. In pretending that there’s anything original to be stolen from any steak-house “concept,” Tesar succeeded only in boosting the profile of Cottini’s modest new North Center meat market—also named Knife to correspond with Fork, his first spot up the street in Lincoln Square....

Back in March, when the weather was still cold and dreary, we praised chef C.J. Jacobson for bringing some west-coast sunshine to Intro, the Lettuce Entertain You concept that hosts a new chef—who presents a new menu—every three months or so. Another LA chef is on his way to the restaurant’s kitchen, by way of New York City. Stephen Gillanders, who started cooking at the tender age of 15, has spent the past four years in New York working as an executive chef for the legendary Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s food empire, overseeing all the NYC properties and helping to open nine more all over the world, including Pump Room in Chicago....

It’s rarely a good sign when a takeout/delivery joint offers everything from crab legs to linguini with clam sauce, plus grilled cheese, Italian beef, fried chicken, barbecued ribs, and pizza. But for decades that’s exactly what Angelo’s did from a dreary storefront in Albany Park. The harsh lighting did little to sell the cardboard slices moldering on display in the front window, but the place had its devotees. Then earlier this year things suddenly went dark and Angelo’s Wine Bar rose up behind the papered windows....

Julia Thiel The biggest flask at WhiskyFest Chicago (possibly the only one) Calling WhiskyFest overwhelming is almost an understatement. There are 80-plus booths, most of them offering four or more whiskies, which adds up to more alcohol than you could drink in a week, much less a few hours (the official website advertises more than 300 whiskies, but I’d estimate it’s closer to 400). The event is so popular that tickets sold out in seven hours this year—considerably less than the seven days they took to sell out last year....

AP Photo/Julie Jacobson, File LeBron did just like T.S. Eliot said he would. Old fans LeBron James had lost years ago and new fans he’d never had in the first place have all been roped in by his astonishing decision to go home. Robert Frost said that home is “the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” T.S. Eliot said we’re all explorers, but “the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time....

Diana Cruz, 44, was born and raised in Chicago and converted to Islam 17 years ago. She’s Mexican on her mother’s side and Puerto Rican on her father’s, volunteers as the administrative coordinator in Chicago for Islam in Spanish, and is working on a degree in Islamic Studies through Mishkah University. Here she describes what it’s been like to witness the impact of anti-immigrant policies under the Donald Trump administration....

Having recorded his previous albums at home, Omaha miscreant David Nance dragged his bloody mess of unkempt rock into a proper studio for his latest, Negative Boogie (Ba Da Bing). Anyone expecting him to clean up his act will be disappointed—or relieved. The new record captures the wild, whooping shouts of Nance’s vocals, the feedback-drenched grime of his guitars, and the primal thud of the drumming with new depth and clarity; listeners get extra grit and grain with every ugly surge....

In November, Coffey reached a settlement in a civil rights complaint filed with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development that alleged systemic housing discrimination on the part of the East Chicago Housing Authority. HUD has provided the authority with $1.9 million to administer housing vouchers, provide relocation counselors, and pay for other moving expenses. West Calumet was built in the 1960s and ’70s atop a defunct lead smelter....

A year and a half ago, I visited Emily Kempf’s home in Pilsen to interview her about her then-active cassette label Cool Girl Tapes. The walls of her living room were papered with black-and-white ink drawings of goblets and flowers and four-eyed women—illustrations that looked like they belonged in a deck of tarot cards. Kempf explained that the sketches decorating her walls were tattoo designs—she had begun using her home as a makeshift tattoo studio, hand-poking her art onto friends and a small client base familiar with her work through Instagram....

Fey (left) with Jane Fonda in This Is Where I Leave You At several points in This Is Where I Leave You, Wendy Altman (Tina Fey) responds to another character’s emotional outburst by grabbing him or her by the upper arm and giving a firm, but not-too-firm squeeze. It might be the closet thing to a consistent character trait one finds in this loose collection of screenwriter’s tics. The movie is flagrantly opportunistic in the way it deploys Fey....