When Mayor Rahm Emanuel recently announced plans to spend about $320 million on the CTA’s “Red-Purple Bypass,” I started pondering this important question: How much is four minutes of Mayor Rahm time in real time? All right, they shouldn’t have killed the number 11 bus, which ran up Lincoln Avenue. And yes, that Ashland Avenue bus rapid-transit plan looks like it will cause more problems than it solves. Plus, we all know that the Ventra card rollout has hardly been smooth sailing....

Julia Thiel Furthermore Beer wasn’t looking to take home any leftovers On Monday Louis Glunz Beer hosted its annual Global Beer Expo at the Stephens Convention Center in Rosemont. There’s always plenty of variety, but because it’s a trade tasting brewers are unlikely to bring the rare and one-off beers you might expect to see at a typical tasting—beer buyers aren’t there to taste products that aren’t available for purchase....

If you’ve seen Sebastian Silva’s acclaimed Chilean film The Maid (2009), you might find The Second Mother a little familiar. Like The Maid, this Brazilian feature is a pointed comedy of manners about a domestic worker who’s lived with an upper-class family for so long that she’s come to define herself through them. As in The Maid, a newcomer to the household threatens the veteran’s stable position; the maid responds anxiously at first but ends up rediscovering her identity and growing from the experience....

Last week Chicago postpunks Meat Wave released their third album, The Incessant, inspired by the stumble into singledom that singer-guitarist Chris Sutter took a couple years back, which ended a 12-year relationship. Sutter recently talked to Noisey about his confronting the breakup in song: “I never wanted it to feel like a ‘woe is me’-type of thing.” And this album doesn’t. On the rigid, tense “Bad Man,” he sneers, “Before he bit the dust remarked the truth will set you free....

If it weren’t the sort of cold, drizzly evening at the time of year when melting snow turns the entire world into a sea of mud that clings to dog paws and sometimes splashes up their legs and onto their bellies, and if he weren’t a 110-pound cane corso, a breed that is capable of killing not only wild boar but also tame humans (at least according to urban legend), and if he weren’t a prize show dog whose single drop of sperm is probably worth more than my entire monthly salary, Paradiso Błekitna Przystan—known to his loved ones as Ivo—and I would be off together having an adventure, maybe splashing in the surf at Montrose Beach or lazing on the deck of a fishing boat or frolicking in the snow in Cumberland Park....

Onstage Robinson chats about her dating history, the weight she gained in her vagina, and her hairstyle choices (Afros make her feel important, she says, “like Frederick Douglass”) with an endearingly upbeat energy. She also lightheartedly addresses gender and race: she feels bad for her white friends, she jokes, because if their kids become astronauts, no one will care. But if Robinson’s future daughter goes into space she’ll end up on a Black History Month stamp....

Julia Thiel Way too many pumpkin beers After last year’s pumpkin beer tastings, which quickly got out of hand and led to me trying more pumpkin beers than I’d ever wanted to, I was planning to skip the whole thing this year. Except I realized I had a bottle of Southern Tier’s Pumking and a Dogfish Head Punkin Ale in the basement that I’d never gotten around to drinking the year before (some people would refer to that as “cellaring,” but I call it “making room in the fridge”)....

The first nonnative settler in the city of Chicago, French-Haitian explorer and trader Jean Baptiste Pointe DuSable, died 197 years ago, and earlier today the DuSable Park Coalition hosted a memorial ceremony at Pioneer Court honoring its namesake. If you couldn’t make it to the celebration you can find a substitute in Dusable, a brand-new mixtape from Chicago rapper the Boy Illinois. The mixtape is a tribute in name rather than execution....

When Melissa Mallinson and Nicole Gifford co-founded the Harvest Chicago Contemporary Dance Festival nine years ago, they were independent choreographers looking for opportunities to show their work in an increasingly dismal environment for the arts. “A number of festivals became defunct around the time of the recession of 2008-’09,” recalls Mallinson. “A lot of arts organizations were really struggling. We were thinking about the types of opportunities we wanted to be involved in, what our experiences had been, and what types of companies and choreographers needed more representation....

Long before he started dancing, the choreographer Silas Riener preferred reading science fiction novels and dreaming of far-off realms. “It’s part of a queer identity—the ‘otherness’ of aliens or fantasy,” Riener says, noting his penchant for sci-fi. “It attracted me because of being in the closet, growing up with people who are different or ways that the world is different.” A former member of Merce Cunningham Dance, Riener is one-third of the creative trio behind Tesseract, a two-part work based on otherworldly themes that will be performed at the MCA this weekend in conjunction with the exhibit “Merce Cunningham: Common Time....

This weekend the Gene Siskel Film Center kicks off a monthlong retrospective devoted to Italian writer-director Lina Wertmüller with the 1975 black comedy Seven Beauties. One of the most contentious films of its decade, Beauties is a picaresque tale of one man’s survival through World War II; its most controversial passages take place in a realistically rendered Nazi concentration camp. Wertmüller gained her reputation as a provocateur with such international hits as Love & Anarchy and Swept Away, and Beauties is perhaps her most provocative film....

He’s just a boy who can’t say no. And why should he, with so many desirable women anxious to offer him what’s quaintly referred to as their charms? Tom Jones is one of those magical young men whose very passivity is a turn-on. Handsome, earnest, well-mannered, self-effacing, doggedly honorable, puppyishly sweet, oddly innocent, and totally buff, he incites maternal feelings as a prelude to something steamier. Even so, he’s got an excellent reason to keep it in his pants: Sophia Western, the passionate yet virtuous daughter of a country squire and Tom’s one true love....

Michael Gebert Decorators Supply Corp. in Bridgeport As far as I’m concerned Open House Chicago, held this weekend, is one of the great events of the year for inveterate snoops and spies like myself. You get to go inside dozens of buildings all over the city whose insides you don’t normally get to see, and see how all kinds of other halves live, work, or lived and worked a century ago....

Two American expats founded a restaurant in Shanghai in 2014. They called it the Fortune Cookie. It served chow mein, egg foo young, hot-and-sour soup, and, naturally, fortune cookies. You cannot get these things at any other restaurant in Shanghai. According to my American expat friend who lives in the neighborhood, it wasn’t very good, and she strongly discouraged me from eating there when I went to visit her. Likewise, the grilled sliced tenderloin looked complicated and elaborate—bunches of lemongrass, hearts of palm, and scallion bundled in slices of dried, thin-sliced beef reminiscent of a bland pastrami, all dolloped with some sort of gelatin that made it appear that the plate was staring back at us with googly reddish-brown eyes—but it tasted friendly and familiar....

In 2015 Franco-German bassist Pascal Niggenkemper dropped a bracing solo album called Look With Thine Ears (Clean Feed), serving up 13 visceral, aggressively tactile studies of his instrument. With the aid of sharp-edged amplification he revealed a particular genius for sound exploration. Niggenkemper prepared his bass with objects like Styrofoam or sticks, then bombarded it, bowing its strings like he was sawing through them and thwacking them to generate a fiercely snapping twang....

KD Young Cocky in cover-art form Lately Chief Keef’s been dropping tracks so frequently it’s like they’re forming a trail of breadcrumbs leading to some long-delayed mixtapes, which, as of last night, come to a grand total of three. In the initial wake of Keef’s new busy season another local pulled me in while kicking out a steady stream of new material: KD Young Cocky. Part of the reason I’m so taken by KD’s version of “Grindin’” is that, unlike Wayne’s complacent performance on the original, KD consistently and audibly gives the track all his effort; it shows in one listen through August’s compilation mixtape, Smoking Right Now: Worst Enemy....

Courtesy the artists Katie Rich and Holly Laurent This weekend the Chicago Funny Women’s Festival highlights the work of more than 70 female acts for the third year in a row. While speaking to Holly Laurent and Katie Rich about Joan and Ro, New York City, 1962, their show in the festival, I couldn’t help but bring up my problem with the festival: the Funny Women Festival is great in its mission—bringing together a bunch of funny women to perform—but there’s no Funny Man Festival....

Mike Sula Jonathan “Goatboy” Zaragoza When Logan Square’s Masa Azul opened a little over three years ago, I didn’t care much for the food, but I loved bartender Jenny Kessler’s cocktails and owner Jason Lerner’s commitment to agave spirits. A little over a year later things came into balance when Lerner brought on Jonathan Zaragoza, who completely reversed a kitchen that was stuck in a stale Euro-Mexican rut in favor of a modern street food and small plates MO much more compatible with a program centered on tequila and mezcal....

It’s songwriter Henry Krieger’s time at Porchlight Music Theatre. The musical-theater composer’s Dreamgirls, a 1981 Broadway hit, is the final show in Porchlight’s 2015-’16 schedule next spring, while his Side Show—a two-time Broadway flop—is the company’s current season opener. Interestingly, both shows examine the loving but conflict-filled relationships between young women who share big dreams of romantic fulfillment and showbiz success. In Dreamgirls, with a libretto by the late Tom Eyen, 1960s soul singers Deena and Effie compete for the same man (their unscrupulous manager) but finally realize that their own bond is more real and durable....

Chicago’s hip-hop scene went into mourning Saturday when news broke that WGCI on-air personality and virtuosic turntablist Timothy Jones, aka DJ Timbuck2, had died. He’d been fighting cancer for a little more than a year and had recently turned 34. Jones, who was also a member of Treated Crew, joined the WGCI team in 2004, and a few years later he launched a Chicago-centric show called GoILL Radio—he not only played new music by artists who rarely received radio exposure, he also brought young talents into the studio for live interviews....