In French, la petite mort—”the little death”—refers to orgasm and its aftermath. There are lots of little deaths (and rebirths) of both the erotic and emotional variety in Hello Again, a lush, sexy adaptation of the 1993 chamber musical by composer-librettist Michael John LaChiusa that opens this year’s Reeling: The Chicago LGBTQ+ International Film Festival. Based loosely on La Ronde, the scandalous 1897 drama by Viennese playwright Arthur Schnitzler (which also inspired films by Max Ophuls and Roger Vadim), this beautifully cast and gorgeously shot movie is a suite of sung-through vignettes exploring themes of seduction and betrayal....

CHRISTOPHER DRUKKER Karl Berger You might’ve been able to glean from some of my Soundboard items that this is a pretty busy weekend, jazzwise. On Saturday night trumpeter Russ Johnson brings his excellent Eric Dolphy project to Constellation, but the big action is happening mostly at Hyde Park’s Promontory, where HotHouse makes a splash from beyond the grave with the Old and New Dreams Festival, an action-packed three-day event where the venue founded by Marguerite Horberg will make some kind of announcement about its return to a new location in Bronzeville, although I’m betting details will be sparse....

The first thing you notice about Martha Mae: Art Supplies & Beautiful Things is the light. Jean Cate’s small shop, near the northeast corner of Clark and Balmoral in Andersonville, is unlike its neighboring storefronts. It doesn’t have a dark awning; its windows aren’t obscured by lettering or decorations; there’s no elaborate display of the wares sold inside. If you took away all the stuff for sale—the row of heavy art books, the brass rulers and pencil sharpeners, the handmade scissors, the wooden animal models, the mason jars of paintbrushes and sponges, the boxes of retro paperclips, the notebooks and sketchbooks and desk pads, the porcelain pallets and the colored pencils, the little bundles of erasers and all the framed etchings and watercolors on the walls—what you’d have left would look like someone’s sparse but inviting home, or an artisan’s workshop....

Evanston library’s “Cranky Librarian” problem blew up in a major way during the last week. As the library’s board initiated abrupt termination proceedings for Lesley Williams (aka “Cranky”), e-mails surfaced revealing that board members and the library’s director had been conspiring to get rid of her for several years. The post consisted of photos of a library flyer that touted “Free & Equal Access for All,” along with this comment by Williams: “Some organizations are true leaders in practicing equity and inclusion....

If you want to know why Mayor Rahm Emanuel will never give up his beloved tax increment financing scam without kicking and screaming, consider these stories that broke back-to-back just last week. A TIF, remember, is effectively a surcharge added to your property tax bill. Instead of going to schools, parks, police, etc, the money is diverted to bank accounts largely controlled by the mayor, leaving the rest of us to make up for the difference....

Dan Auerbach is best known as the front man for massive Ohio duo the Black Keys, a band who pull huge swing and tons of energy out of a simple, swampy blues-punk sound. As the band evolved their songs slowly became more dynamic, and their limited sonic palette expanded, but nothing prepared me for what I’d hear on Auerbach’s brand-new project the Arcs. The band, which is a collaboration between Auerbach, Shins member Richard Swift, Dap-Kings drummer Homer Steinweiss, and a handful of others ditch the dirge of Black Keys and trade it in for dreamy, psychedelic pop....

Over five decades French director Philippe Garrel has honed a distinctive approach to filmmaking that might be described as a cross between Romantic poetry and the experimental cinema of Andy Warhol. Garrel shares with Warhol a cool fascination with downtime, faces in close-up, and the physical properties of film. His ties to classic Romanticism can be felt in his obsession with melancholy, natural beauty, love, and loss of love. His career also might be described as a quixotic mission to show the invisible, as many of his films’ titles suggest: The Inner Scar, Les Hautes Solitudes (which translates roughly as “high solitude”), The Birth of Love, Wild Innocence, and now Jealousy....

Gloria Steinem never stops moving. Over the course of her decades-long career, the mother of second-wave feminism and Ms. Magazine cofounder has advocated for women’s rights around the world, whether by posing as a Playboy bunny in Hugh Hefner’s New York club or protecting prostitutes in India. She also put in time on Adlai Stevenson’s presidential campaign, worked (unsuccessfully) to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, produced an HBO documentary on child abuse, traveled the world as a lecturer, and picked up a Presidential Medal of Freedom in the process....

In 2009, just months after Governor Rod Blagojevich was impeached, the General Assembly rewrote the state’s campaign finance laws in order to end what was widely known as the “wild west” era of unregulated political contributions, when money was thrown around like confetti. Ironically, the latest donation has left Quinn—Rauner’s opponent—lambasting the return of the wild west financing that the law was supposed to eradicate. But the rules essentially say that there are no rules when a candidate gives at least $250,000 to his or her own campaign....

FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP/Getty Images A vendor weighs buds for medical marijuana patients at Los Angeles’s first-ever cannabis farmer’s market on July 4. “It is long past time to repeal this version of Prohibition,” the New York Times said Sunday, in an editorial calling for an end to the federal ban on marijuana. It will be even longer past time before this version of Prohibition is repealed. The NYT conceded that the present Congress “is as unlikely to take action on marijuana as it has been on other big issues....

Nikka Costa, daughter of celebrated arranger/producer Don Costa (and goddaughter of Frank Sinatra) had a minor buzz going in the 2000s with a couple of albums on the Virgin label: Everybody Got Their Something and Can’tneverdidnothin’. This was when the whole neosoul genre was coming on hard and heavy; those two albums, with their nods to 70s funk and mild hip-hop feel, were textbook examples of that style. By 2008, she’d switched to the revived Stax label and released a new record, Pebble to a Pearl, that featured the Daptones as her backup band and, perhaps predictably, leaned toward a 60s soul feel....

Robin Williams had a knack for playing lonely introverts, as he demonstrated in Good Will Hunting, One Hour Photo, The Night Caller, World’s Greatest Dad, The Face of Love, and one of his final films, Boulevard, which is newly available on DVD. These movies vary in overall quality, yet Williams delivered committed performances in all of them, conveying the weight of his characters’ inner turmoil through careful body language and quiet line readings....

When I bought my beautiful brown-felt fedora from him a few years ago, Optimo owner Graham Thompson was still operating out of a combination storefront and factory on Western Avenue in Beverly, where the hat-making happened on premises. Things have changed. In 2016, Thompson moved production to a former firehouse on 95th; if you want to buy a hat, you head for the store at 51 W. Jackson, in the Monadnock Building....

“There is only one thing I know about life. If you live long enough you start losing things. Things get stolen from you: First you lose your youth, and then your parents, and then you lose your friends, and finally you end up losing yourself.” Throughout The Sarah Book McClanahan portrays himself as an agent of chaos and misery, detailing the ways in which his tantrums, fixations, and paranoias hurt his wife, children, and everyone else he comes into contact with; and yet the reader neither pities nor despises him....

Lucille Bluth can’t believe that the time to vote for 2014’s Best of Chicago is almost over. Time flies. Take our Best of Chicago voting: it seems like only yesterday that we made BOC ballots open to the public. Now that time is coming to a close. We’re wrapping up voting in our Best of Chicago Readers’ Poll at 9 AM on Monday, May 12. So if you haven’t voted in our Best of Chicago poll, you might want to get started, er, NOW....

Botellita de Cielo/Wikimedia Commons The Afghan Whigs You can infer from our announcement of the full Riot Fest lineup that there is a surplus of acts to see this weekend. Despite the range of bands and solo artists playing the festival, I was nonetheless surprised to find that the Afghan Whigs are on Saturday’s bill. During the 90s the Greg Dulli-fronted Cincinnati band were viewed as a weirder (not wackier), stylistically varied alternative to much of the “alternative” grunge music proliferating at the time....

The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek Today at 11:30 AM, the Music Box screens Unfaithfully Yours, a late film by the great satirist Preston Sturges. It isn’t among my favorite of his films—what Dave Kehr calls a “[move] toward a more Lubitschian elegance,” I’d describe as a softening of his sensibilities, though that’s in no way meant to disparage the great Ernst Lubitsch. Even with the film’s dark sensibilities, it lacks the bite of his best work, the unique brand of satire that’s simultaneously pessimistic and jocund....

Chicago cornetist Josh Berman works at a measured pace. Though he’s ubiquitous on the local scene, having played in countless bands and programmed the Sunday-night jazz and improvised-music series at the Hungry Brain, he’s been extremely judicious about recording with his own projects. As a bandleader, he’s made just three albums. “I spend a lot of time at home working on shapes, ideas,” Berman says. “I like playing a lot, but at the same time I like to develop things at home, think about it, and work it out on the horn—and then kind of bring it out....

Disappears bassist Damon Carruesco has been hard at work on a new experimental project he’s calling Tüth. A marked departure from the noisy Krautrock grooves of Disappears, Tüth entertains elements of both industrial music and hip-hop in the handful of tracks that have emerged on its SoundCloud page. Carruesco’s barbed wire beats support whispered vocals, pitch-shifted raps, and traces of saxophone, all in the service of a feeling of isolation that’s more Death Grips than Kraftwerk....

Hundred Waters | 3:30 Artists’ names are in the color of the stage they’re appearing on. See our previews of the bands playing on Saturday and Sunday. Pitchfork main » Neneh Cherry | 4:35 Brooklyn-based singer Sharon Van Etten has steadily grown in confidence and strength since her wonderfully modest 2009 debut, Because I Was in Love, and she drives that fact home on the recent Are We There (Jagjaguwar). As usual her songs dive headfirst into the painful side of love, depicting with grueling fidelity the way devotion and desire can blind the rational mind....