A few weeks ago I went to an afternoon party at Experimental Sound Studio to celebrate the weekly Option series organized by Ken Vandermark, Tim Daisy, and Andrew Clinkman. The series focuses on improvised music, but the entertainment for this event consisted of Vandermark, Daisy, and occasional Reader contributor John Corbett lined up behind a row of laptops, a CD player, and a turntable in ESS’s outdoor garden, spinning just about anything but improvised music....

Stand-up comedian Beth Stelling, who got her start in Chicago, revealed details of a past abusive relationship on Instagram earlier today. In a post that included photos of her bruised arms and legs, she wrote that an ex-boyfriend had raped her, and that he had physically and verbally abused her. Same girl in all of these photos (me). I’ve had an amazing year and you’ve seen the highlights here, so these photos are an uncommon thing to share but not an uncommon issue....

Wesley Snipes (right) in The Art of War As far as movies went, the summer of 2000 was a season of disappointment. The big-studio flops included, but were not limited to: Battlefield Earth, Roland Emmerich’s The Patriot, the Wesley Snipes actioner The Art of War, Coyote Ugly (Jerry Bruckheimer’s misbegotten attempt at a feminist statement), Paul Verhoeven’s Hollow Man (though, unlike any of the other movies listed here, that one has gotten better with age), and a couple of flat children’s features (Titan A....

Q I’m 21 and still a virgin. I also have depression. I’m not bad looking. I work out and generally keep people laughing. I got a lot of female attention in school, but I was hopeless and still am. Most of my friends have girlfriends, so I don’t understand why I haven’t had a girlfriend since I was ten. I feel myself becoming increasingly violent, to the extent that I have tried to provoke a fight that wasn’t necessary and I try to intimidate other guys when I’m out....

Even if you don’t have tickets to see Phil Collins—the King of Prog-Pop himself—at United Center on Monday night, you can still get your fix of all things heady, techy, and whimsical this week in Chicago. Progtoberfest IV is a massive three-day celebration of prog rock old and new that spans both stages at Reggie’s. In 2018, progressive rock is a superniche genre, and this fest brings some of its most impressive names to the forefront, including Pat Metheny drummer Paul Wertico, former Spock’s Beard members Neal Morse and Nick D’Virgilio (performing separately with their own ensembles), and sci-fi-influenced Canadian band FM....

Some years ago some friends used a credit card to pay the check after an epic feast at San Soo Gab San, the 26-year-old late-night north-side granddaddy of live-coal Korean barbecue. As they made their way to the door toward the perpetually packed parking lot beyond, they were chased down by their server, one of the stoic ajummas who haul around the banchan and scissor the sizzling galbi for endless hordes of soju-soaked carousers....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Tuesday, March 28, 2017. An ICE agent shot and wounded a man while serving an arrest warrant A man was shot and wounded by a U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agent in the Belmont Cragin neighborhood Monday morning. The ICE agent was serving an arrest warrant at a home when the father of the man named in the warrant allegedly pointed a gun at agents....

We’ve got capsule reviews of: Youth, Paolo Sorrentino’s first feature since his Oscar-winning The Great Beauty; The Big Short, adapted from Michael Lewis’s best seller about the subprime mortgage meltdown; The Danish Girl, starring Eddie Redmayne as the first man to undergo sex reassignment surgery; Don Verdean, a new comedy from Napoleon Dynamite director Jared Hess; Gabo: The Creation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a documentary about the revered Colombian novelist; In the Heart of the Sea, Ron Howard’s whaling epic about the true story behind Moby-Dick; The Keeping Room, a drama about three southern women menaced by Union scouts in the last days of the confederacy; Macbeth, starring Michael Fassbender, Marion Cotillard, and David Thewlis; Paradise Is There, a “video memoir” by singer Natalie Merchant; Stinking Heaven, a black comedy set at a sober-living commune in Passaic, New Jersey; and Theeb, billed as the first “Bedouin western....

Here’s the deal: Do not put plastic bags, food, wood, clothing, cords, hoses, propane tanks, or construction waste into your recycling cart. And this warning goes out to my neighbors: Don’t put cat litter in there either! After seeing DNAInfo’s story on the new stickers rolled out to enforce the city’s change in January 2016 from bagged to bagless recycling, and the detailed list of the stuff that, it turns out, can’t be recycled (paper coffee cups?...

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Tuesday, August 15, 2017. Rauner is mad that the senate overrode his school funding veto Governor Bruce Rauner is not happy that the Illinois senate overrode his amendatory veto of the school funding bill, saying Monday that the senate had made “a terrible mistake.” An Illinois State Board of Education analysis received last week said CPS “would receive $463 less in funding this next year school under Gov....

Read our interview with Petrusich. Jonathan Ward Founder of the blog excavatedshellac.com, producer of Opika Pende: Africa at 78 RPM With blues, jazz, and country, there are discographies, books, and a myriad of collectors who have set the canon, so to speak. Everything is known. This is not true in the slightest with early music from around the world—most recordings are not yet known, certainly not in English-speaking countries. You have to be willing to take risks—sometimes that can hurt financially, yet it can also provide un­paralleled thrills if you’ve got an open mind....

John Darnielle, the singer, songwriter, and only consistent member of the Mountain Goats, wrote a novella, released in 2008 as one of the more offbeat entries in the 33 1/3 series, about Black Sabbath’s 1971 album Master of Reality. His first full-length novel, Wolf in White Van, published last month, is evidence that the acclaimed lyricist has quickly become a skillful writer of fiction. The novel unfolds nonlinearly, mostly in reverse....

One of the tracks from Rubberoom’s Gothic Architecture is on Kid Millions’s latest Chicago rap mix Back in November I came across a compilation of old-school Chicago rap songs called “88-98 Chicago mix,” which features a handful of cuts that aren’t easy to find in any physical form. The tunes came straight from the crates of Milwaukee rapper Kid Millions, aka John Kuester, one of the founders of Dope Folks Records, a small reissue label that released one of my favorite overlooked local hip-hop releases of 2013, Black A....

Aimee Levitt The view from Stan’s. Glazed and Infused is in the upper right corner. I used to envy people in LA because they got to live in the Doughnut Capital of America. It didn’t matter that the designation was mostly self-proclaimed. They had lots and lots of doughnut shops. They had a giant statue of a doughnut. I, meanwhile, lived in the Land of Dunkin’ Donuts. When Krispy Kreme migrated north, it was a genuine thrill to eat warm doughnuts fresh off the conveyer belt....

Capping off a year in which she self-released her critically acclaimed sophomore LP, Room 25, Chicago rapper and poet Noname is set to close out 2018 with three consecutive hometown performances. Born Fatimah Nyeema Warner, the Bronzeville native went by Noname Gypsy before settling on her current nom de plume, under which she dropped her 2016 mixtape of hip-hop-infused neosoul, Telefone. Room 25 maintains the same upbeat, melodic vibes as that debut, and it showcases Noname’s evolution as an artist, with poignant commentary on racial and sociopolitical subjects, vividly sexual lyrics, and beautiful live instrumentation and string arrangements....

UPDATE: DNAinfo reports that family and a friend have been assured that Tidwell is safe. Farinas told DNAinfo that Tidwell in recent days had “faced an intensifying sense of hopelessness.” Farinas said friends “believe that Dane is a threat to himself and needs help. We are fearful for his life.” Police were notified. My introduction to Tidwell came four years ago, when I reported the bleak end of the once thriving bar rag Gay Chicago....

At the Table If there’s one thing that’s rarely in short supply at storefront theater, it’s new plays that follow the Big Chill template: classmates and old buds reunite in adulthood for drinks, memories, arguments, and unexpected self-examination. Michael Perlman’s 2015 script, about friends who surrender their smartphones at the door of a vacation home during two separate weekends, largely follows that tried-and-true format. But Broken Nose Theatre’s version, retooled by Perlman and director Spenser Davis, reflects changes in casual conversations since the 2016 presidential race and election....

Even before the Women’s March last Saturday was history, the archivists at the Newberry Library suspected it would be historic. They put out a call for Chicagoans to send in photos and bring their signs, their buttons, their pussyhats, and whatever other materials they carried with them to the library to be preserved forever in its archive. The library began putting out calls for materials on social media on Friday; the response was immediate and overwhelming....

Adapted in 1987 by Stephen Mallatratt from Susan Hill’s 1983 novel about a man literally haunted by the titular vengeful evil spirit, this play has been running continuously in London’s West End since 1989, and it is easy to see why. The story is engaging, packed with interesting, eccentric English characters, and contains enough jump scares to keep an audience on the edge of its seat. Mallatratt actually tells two stories at once in his adaptation: one about the attempt to turn a man’s recollections of a traumatic event into a theater piece, and the other about the traumatic memory itself....

“You fuckin’ amateur.” —Thomas Vaccaro, Danny’s brother, in Danny Casolaro Died for You Casolaro’s investigations led him to a nest of miscreants and misfits reminiscent of the Watergate plumbers or the free-Cuba types depicted in Oliver Stone’s movie JFK. One of them was Mike Riconosciuto, portrayed here (by an endlessly entertaining Mark Richard) as a sort of street-smart version of Bobby Fischer, existing in a constant state of nerdish exasperation. Riconosciuto, aka Danger Man, apparently got the conspiratorial ball rolling, telling Casolaro that he was one of two Republican operatives sent to Iran to bribe the ayatollahs into holding on to their American hostages until after the 1980 presidential election, so as to deny Jimmy Carter the “October surprise” he needed to beat Reagan....