From what I hear, 1990 was a hell of a year. NASA sent the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit, Nelson Mandela was released from prison—and, crucially, I was born unto this world. Twenty-five years later, as part of the Chicago Humanities Festival, a panel of six WBEZ radio personalities and six storytellers and poets will come together for a month-by-month review of 1990. Just because I lived through only half of ’90 doesn’t mean I can’t contribute to the conversation....

John H. White/Sun-Times Media Cook County commissioner John Fritchey wants Illinois officials to start creating a regulatory framework for legalizing marijuana. Legalize it. “It is well past time to recognize that the so-called ‘war on drugs’ has been a misguided failure with respect to marijuana laws and policies,” Cook County commissioner John Fritchey, who’s leading the effort, said in a written statement. “The Illinois Legislature should follow the successful lead of other states and start taking meaningful steps toward a workable framework to allow the responsible sale and use of cannabis....

Stefan Freund/Wikimedia Commons Roman Flügel The German record label Dial has been on my radar for a while now, having put out a distinctly sumptuous and elegant brand of house music that carries a melancholy and foreboding tinge. This year the label has released another winner, Frankfurt DJ and producer Roman Flügel’s Happiness Is Happening. Flügel has been making music since the early 90s and is known for shifting between IDM, techno, house, and myriad electronic subgenres....

Gossip Wolf first heard about synth maven Bil Vermette and his Tangerine Dreamy 1984 private-press LP, Katha Visions, in 2010 from the Secret History of Chicago Music, Steve Krakow‘s regular Reader feature. We finally got to hear the long-out-of-print record in December, when Permanent Records and Krakow’s Galactic Archive label (a collaboration with Logan Hardware) re­issued it in a snazzy edition of 300—and it transported us across the solar system. Vermette will celebrate with a solo set at the Owl on Sun 1/19; also on the bill are Brett Naucke, who hopes to have copies of a new 45 called Transparency (on Catholic Tapes/Notes & Bolts), and Kraut­rock crush groovers Cave, who leave for a South American tour the next day....

From Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Blue In a making-of documentary about Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Blue, the Polish director recounts the making of a scene in which Juliette Binoche’s character becomes lost in thought while drinking coffee in a cafe. He wanted to illustrate her internal experience with the image of a sugar cube absorbing coffee after it’s dropped into a cup. He was convinced the shot should last exactly five seconds, so he sent his assistant to buy every brand of sugar cube available in Paris to find the one that dissolved at the appropriate speed....

On “Goldmember’s Alchemy” Chicago rapper-singer L.A. VanGogh extols the value of labor, with lines arguing that the only way to attain riches yourself is to put in the work. And with his new Everything Is Subjective: Episode 2 (Private Stock), he makes sure to show you how. L.A. has long since proved himself to be one of the most gifted vocalists in Chicago hip-hop, veering so smoothly between singing and rapping that he seems to evaporate the barriers between those forms....

Last month I posted a track from the forgotten 80s Manchester band the Fates, a combo led by Una Baines—a founding member of both the Fall and Blue Orchids. It doesn’t take much for the music of the Blue Orchids, which Baines and Bramah formed in 1979, to get lodged in my brain, so writing about and listening to the Fates naturally led me to pull out The Greatest Hit (Money Mountain), the brilliant 1982 debut by Blue Orchids....

New York magazine last week declared the latest fashion trend brought in by millennials, and millennials only: the color pink. It was in 2012, the article states, that the color first started showing up everywhere. By 2016 it existed in multiple shades and was given the name “millennial pink.” This seems like a good time to talk about rosé. As the color pink has become more popular, so too has this white-girl wine, rebranded with a French name to make us forget that it’s the same thing that’s been available by the box since the late 70s....

Mike Sula Brisket from Todds BBQ inside Mariano’s There’s no kind of restaurant in which self-regard outmatches ability as consistently as the barbecue restaurant. I’m at my wit’s burnt end with the plague of lousy smoked meat that’s swept the city in the last year and a half, but part of what makes it so galling is the tedious Kountry Kitsch these places drape themselves in and the attendant boastfulness about their associated pitmasters....

Michael Gebert Chef Michael Taus and beverage director Don Sritong of Coppervine “You know, they did a really extensive training program. How would you like to take the wine test they gave the servers?” Jenn Galdes, publicist for Coppervine, a Lincoln Park wine bar and restaurant that opened in December, asked me. The concept behind the restaurant is that every dish on the menu—created by chef Michael Taus, formerly of Zealous and Duchamp—comes with a well-chosen wine pairing, beer pairing, and cocktail pairing....

Many a mental health professional advises that if you’re really afraid of something, the best thing to do is confront your fear. That’s sort of what comedian-musician Danny Black is up to with the God, Sex, and Death Variety Hour. During his opening monologue at the August show, Black, who plays host, admits he’s terrified of death but swears that “talking about it makes it better.” In reference to the god part, Black says he had a religious experience on a retreat once—god spoke to him, obviously—but he mostly ignored it at the time; so giving the guy (or gal) a nod now seems like the polite thing to do....

Q: I’m a woman in my early 30s having sex with a guy in his early 20s. The sex is more than casual, and we really care about each other. My concern is this guy has some alt-right sympathies that reveal themselves in our political discussions. He’s a Trump guy, but hesitates to admit it because he knows I’m anti-Trump. He shares memes created by Mike Cernovich and Milo Yiannopoulos, he gets his news from hard-right publications, and his sister and brother-in-law are Holocaust deniers....

Nostalgia is the name of the game at Riot Fest. Since its early days, the festival has featured artists playing their most-loved albums front to back, and this year it’s ramped up the number of these sets to ten. But how have the years treated these alleged classics? I’ve listened to all ten, and they’re arranged below in order of initial release. Dinosaur Jr. You’re Living All Over Me (1987)...

During the garage-rock boom of the 90s and 00s, the Woggles made frequent visits to Chicago from their Atlanta home base. Though their stepped-up twist beats and occasional choreography drew comparisons to the Fleshtones, it was clear that the quartet were mapping out their own path. As the millennium has progressed, the Woggles have been slightly less visible in these parts, but they haven’t slowed their step at all. Their most recent album, Tally Ho!...

Let’s face facts here. Beaches is first and foremost a 1988 film starring Bette Midler and Barbara Hershey as two best friends who yak/sob their way through careers, single parenthood, and serious illness. Rainer Dart, who’s mostly written novels, took an earlier crack at theater in 2011 with The People in the Picture, a Holocaust musical New York Times critic Ben Brantley called “thin treacle.” In Beaches, her lyrics high-five each other like so many unmemorable children’s rhymes....

There’s plenty of Chicago history shut up in the city’s libraries, museums, and archives, but there’s also plenty of it sitting out on the streets in plain view. You just need the right guide to show you. That’s where Paul Durica comes in. As an instructor at and graduate of the U. of C. (his dissertation was on tramps, hobos, and transients in American literature), Durica knows how to navigate libraries, museums, and archives and extract interesting facts and information about the city’s past....

The Black Ensemble Theater is known for its jukebox musicals about African-American musical giants—Etta James, Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye, Nina Simone. But the subjects of The Black White Love Play are a journalist and a lawyer: Roger Ebert, longtime film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, and his wife, Chaz Hammelsmith Ebert, an attorney who left her law career to manage Ebert’s business ventures. Roger was the first film critic to receive a Pulitzer Prize, a world-famous TV pundit and author of dozens of books....

Sonia Recchia/Getty Images Jian Ghomeshi in more employed times. Jian Ghomeshi, founder and host of the CBC’s Q, which WBEZ airs four nights a week at 8 PM, was fired Sunday for reasons apparently related to his private life. The Toronto Star, reporting Ghomeshi’s dismissal, said it had been approached in recent months by “three young women, all about 20 years his junior, who say he was physically violent to them without their consent during sexual encounters or in the lead-up to sexual encounters....

A fort constructed of mattress box springs and tree branches woven together; a plastic sign from a salon serving as front door; an elaborate warren of cardboard boxes; an open-air living room with an overstuffed couch; a journal and toiletries arranged neatly on the concrete barrier beneath a highway overpass; Christmas ornaments and tiki torches decorating trees around a tent patched up with duct tape. The dwellings of Chicago’s “homeless” reflect just how much effort and creativity people put into making “homes,” whether they’re tucked beneath viaducts, sheltered under trees, obscured behind electric boxes, or hidden in plain sight in downtown alleyways....

The first annual Two Piece Fest Midwest came and went, but cofounder Craig Woods is still keeping busy. Tonight he’s performing at Township with a couple of bands: sludgy punk three-piece Pink Eyes and punky, lo-fi rock outfit Hot Bagels, which caught my ear at the beginning of the year with a full-length called Toasted. That album landed Hot Bagels in Gossip Wolf last month, which detailed Woods’s process of making the record, including how he recorded the vocals while driving around in his car looking for jobs....