One week before opening day, Riot Fest has finalized its lineup, though the three big additions went public yesterday. When the festival announced Run the Jewels, Weezer, and Taking Back Sunday (who play the fest almost as frequently as Andrew W.K. and Gwar), they were presented as replacements for previously announced headliners Blink-182, who were forced to cancel several dates because drummer Travis Barker has been struggling with blood clots in his arms since June....

To say that book writer Buddy Farmer and composer Michael Mahler’s newish biomusical respects its subject, legendary 1920’s Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne, would be downplaying the sheer extent to which it venerates the guy. No doubt his contributions to university athletics and Hoosier pride at large are worthy of song, but sweet Jesus, this painfully earnest and often schlocky tribute plays out like the sort of show an autocrat in a banana republic would commission about himself....

Did you know that you can patent a recipe in India? Me neither. But if you invent something delicious—say, unicorn tikka masala—and you don’t want anyone biting your style, you can lock that goodness down. And yet apparently there are chefs who wouldn’t dream of doing that, who believe their inspirations are gifts to humanity. That’s how, according to legend, a guy named A.M. Buhari gave his Chicken 65 to the world....

One of the biggest commercial hits of 2018, Black Panther introduced many viewers to Afrofuturism, a decades-old arts movement that combines traditional African culture with science-fiction and fantasy. This past January and February, Doc Films presented a seven-film series on Afrofuturism in cinema, with selections ranging from Blade (1995), the vampire adventure starring Wesley Snipes, to Space Is the Place (1974), about visionary jazz musician Sun Ra. And this Saturday at 7:30 PM, Chicago Filmmakers hosts a program of Afrofuturist short films from the past decade, curated by Floyd Webb of Black World Cinema....

Flashbacks and Dream Sequences: The Story of the Moles I was recently made hip to the Moles, an Australian outfit who existed in two forms: as a band in the late 80s and early 90s, and as the brief moniker of singer-songwriter Richard Davies (who also fronted the band). My discovery is due to a recently released box set by the great Fire Records that collects the entire recorded output of any music issued under the Moles moniker....

Michael Gebert Amaro and other spirits in the CH Distillery line. Amaro is an Italian digestif, sweet and bitter at the same time, made by macerating regional herbs and botanicals into a neutral spirit. It’s become a popular ingredient as a bittering flavor in cocktails of late. CH Distillery’s signature spirit is their vodka made from Illinois grains, so it was an easy guess that it was the base for their amaro, which just went on sale a couple of weeks ago....

We were looking into the setting sun, shading our eyes with a hand so we could see better what was happening on the field. The field was plastic, geometrically painted to delight the eye, though we’d rather have looked at grass. But as if to compensate nature for the insult to it, across the field where there’d be the far stands in any more imposing venue there was only a line of trees....

When singer-songwriter John Lutkevich wrapped up last year’s The Light (Disposable America/Exploding in Sound), his debut full-length as Soft Fangs, he told Independent Music News that he “became obsessed with the idea of transcendence, of struggling through something in order to reach a higher state.” It’s unclear what, if anything, Lutkevich may have been struggling with personally, and that lack of definition allows The Light to breathe: trembling guitars, mumbling vocals, and whispering electronic blips exude a deep sense of sorrow as they shade in emotions rather than articulate them....

Terminator Genisys, which is currently in theaters, is heavy with self-knowing camp, especially when Arnold Schwarzenegger’s onscreen. His performance registers as one long, self-effacing joke, his dialogue touching on how he’s too old to be an action star anymore and how limited he’s always been as an actor. (One running gag involves him struggling to smile in a realistic manner.) And yet the film inspires a certain sympathy for his character, a killer cyborg reprogrammed to be a loving parent....

The first act of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull centers on a botched production of an experimental play that’s been written and directed by an oversensitive young man named Konstantin Treplev. The production bears all the markings of bad avant-garde theater: it’s humorless and incomprehensible, full of baffling imagery and pretentious language. Treplev thinks he’s broken new ground. His mother, a successful actress on the commercial stage, laughs at the poor boy, dismissing his work as decadent nonsense....

With multiple police abuse scandals and an impending potential teachers’ strike, this has turned out to be a kidney stone of a year for Mayor Emanuel. But the silver lining of Rahm’s reign has always been smart transportation policies, and our city racked up a remarkable number of wins in that department in 2015. Let’s take a look back at some of the key local walking, biking, transit, and public space stories of the past 12 months, in roughly chronological order....

The year is halfway over, and the movie to beat for my favorite Chicago premiere of 2015 remains Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice, which opened here in January. Vice is one of the most inspired literary adaptations I’ve seen—it’s so densely realized that watching the movie feels like wandering through Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 novel. Anderson claims that for his first draft of the script, he simply typed up the entire book in screenplay form, and the finished film preserves so many details from the book one can’t possibly catch them all on one viewing....

This year Marshmallow Fluff, America’s oldest brand of marshmallow creme, celebrates its 100th anniversary. It wasn’t the first commercially available version—that honor goes to a brand called Snowflake—but it has outlasted its rival by more than 50 years. And Fluff has a particularly devoted following, especially in Massachusetts, where it was invented and is honored with an annual “What the Fluff” festival. (The state also made national headlines in 2006 after a senator filed a measure that would limit serving Fluffernutter sandwiches in school cafeterias to once a week, which provoked outrage and prompted other legislators to propose making the Fluffernutter the state sandwich....

In April, President Donald Trump pledged not to deport undocumented immigrants with Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals status—aka “Dreamers”—telling the more than 875,000 people brought to the U.S. illegally as children that they should “rest easy.” I go into Pilsen and Back of the Yards to reach out to community members, helping them get knowledge. Aside from the education part of it, we are really making sure that we’re protecting one another in these very uncertain times....

I’ve used up a lot of words describing the dissatisfying state of ramen in this city. So it’s somewhat disgruntling to admit that I think I met the best ramen broth around at the newly revamped Boka—and it’s not employed in a soup. It’s in a grilled Spanish octopus appetizer. The precisely arranged tentacles rest in a shallow pool of roasted-pork broth that so effectively apes the collagen-rich sumptuousness of a proper tonkotsu broth it’s a shame chef Lee Wolen hasn’t thrown his hat in with the legions of ramen pretenders that have proliferated in the city these past few years....

One Day Pina Asked . . . (1983), Chantal Akerman’s TV documentary about German choreographer Pina Bausch, was made during a pivotal chapter in Akerman’s career, during which the Belgian filmmaker combined her minimalist style (most evident in her 1975 epic Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles) with elements of classic movie musicals. The previous year Akerman had released Toute une Nuit, a series of narrative fragments on the themes of romantic longing and fulfillment; there’s no singing, but the stylized sets and the characters’ dancelike movements suggest a sort of visual music....

Midwestern Cuisine Chicago’s identity has long been tied to its working-class roots. Labor battles such as the Pullman strike and the Haymarket riots, born of conflict between wealthy elites and exploited laborers, defined Chicago’s culture. But the struggles of Chicago’s rail yard and factories paled in comparison to those of its packinghouses, where the city gave birth to modern food processing. That rich history is explored in Slaughterhouse: Chicago’s Union Stock Yard and the World It Made (University of Chicago Press), a new book by Columbia College history professor Dominic Pacyga....

To be mortal is to sense that time passes and is finite. To make rhythm is to know that time subdivides infinitely—the more you make, the more you have. This is the beauty of Stomp, a wordless percussion piece, created by Luke Cresswell and Steve McNicholas and developed through the nearly 30 years of ensembles that have performed it. It demonstrates this concept in vignettes that can be appreciated as much for their mathematics as they can for their visceral wit....

Melina Duterte is loosening up. In 2016, under her Jay Som moniker, she released the compilation Turn Into, a collection of songs from the past few years that earnestly bounces between fuzzed-out folkie dream pop and more tightly wound shoegaze, though less with glee than with purpose. But with her new album Everybody Works (Polyvinyl) everything has started to blend. Songs rollick more, less bound to metronomic rhythms, and every once in a while Duterte just lets melodies fly, dabbing a little melisma here and unfurling her vocal rhythms a bit there....

Heaven Now Local duo Foul Tip is playing a free show at Cole’s Bar in Logan Square this Saturday. Two-piece bands are hardly an uncommon sight, but it’s difficult to find one that uses minimalism as such an excellent advantage as Foul Tip. Made up of bassist Adam Luksetich and drummer Ed Bornstein, the band creates tense, herky-jerky post-punk cuts topped off with deadpan vocal interplay. The vibe is very much like a stripped-down Wire or Fugazi, and part of what makes these guys shine so much is the fact that both members are exceptional musicians—as a drummer myself, I can say that Bornstein is one of my favorites to watch in town, and Luksetich’s bass tone is thick and rich, leaving no empty sonic space....