Local multimedia outlet and party-promotion collective Mucho Culo has hosted a monthly footwork and juke showcase at Subterranean’s downstairs lounge since November 2015, and it’s doing its part to keep Wicker Park’s historical connection to underground arts cultures from dissolving entirely. Mucho Culo events are responsible for some of my fondest memories of Subterranean: I remember seeing leather-clad punks who’d come for the early show sticking around to watch footwork dancers battle in the center of the room....

Q I am wondering when the best time is to mention being in an open relationship to new girls. I’m a 27-year-old straight guy who’s been in an open relationship for six years. I often seek out extracurricular activities, but I am unsure of how to bring up my situation without doors closing. I wrote to a seduction blogger who often writes about open relationships, and his advice was to not mention it until I’ve had sex with the girl a few times and to not bring them to my apartment that I share with my girlfriend....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Tuesday, July 4, 2017. Happy Independence Day! Standard & Poor’s calls Illinois house’s actions a “crucial step” to ending budget impasse Weekend progress at the Illinois capitol in Springfield has the financial world slightly more optimistic about Illinois’s financial future. Illinois has been facing a junk bond rating from Standard and Poor’s Global Ratings if a budget deal is not reached as soon as possible....

It’s been more than two years since drill music and its best-known practitioner, Chief Keef, broke out of the south side, but a casual observer could easily get the impression that they’re still the only thing happening in Chicago rap. Two recent high-profile Web documentaries—World Star Hip Hop’s ambitious and messy The Field, which came out in January, and Noisey’s sensationalist and repugnant Chiraq, which ran weekly from January till March—both focused on the drill scene, and in February the folks at WTTW’s Chicago Tonight ran a story that sounded like they’d just discovered it....

Next year marks the 50th anniversary of the Hairy Who’s first exhibition at the Hyde Park Art Center. As a precursor to the semicentennial celebration, three members of the group—Art Green, Gladys Nilsson, and Karl Wirsum—will converse with international curator and codirector of London’s Serpentine Galleries Hans Ulrich Obrist about the collective’s history and influence on contemporary art. The international art fair courted Obrist for years; the topic of the Hairy Who cemented the curator’s participation....

In March 2015, South Korean clothing company Litmus announced an endorsement deal with Monsta X, a K-pop group that had been a unit for a handful of months and had only a couple singles to their name. Such is the way of K-pop’s assembly-line system, an art in its own right, and Monsta X are among the latest by-products on the rise, a seven-piece boy band with a hip-hop twist that came together on a reality program called No Mercy....

Years ago, when singer-songwriter and editor Renaldo Migaldi was one of the brainy, quirky editorial assistants and fact-checkers who used to interrogate every about-to-be-published word at the Reader, he heard me lament the arrival of fall as the harbinger of winter and said that was exactly the reason he welcomed it. Why? What La Bohème has that Rent doesn’t is some of opera’s most sublime music. Puccini was a master at seduction through sound....

Young New York-based saxophonist Chris Pitsiokos continues a striking creative ascent this year, releasing two very different recordings that build on the pinpoint precision and unhinged fury that characterized his earlier work. On Before the Heat Death (Clean Feed), with the quartet CP Unit, Pitsiokos shows the clear influence of quartet drummer Weasel Walter in his playing, applying go-for-broke intensity to various free-jazz modes. In 29 packed minutes, the group—which also includes guitarist Brandon Seabrook and electric bassist Tim Dahl—puts its own no-fat spin on the Contortions, Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time, chaotic noise freak-outs, and high-velocity iterations of Walter’s trademark brutal prog....

For the last few days, I’ve been trying to think up a worthwhile way for Chicago to commemorate the life and legacy of Pat Hill, the great citizen activist, who died of cancer on September 3. She was 66—way too young. Born and raised on the south side, Hill graduated from Harlan High. She was a high school track star, coming close to qualifying for the 1968 Olympics in the long jump....

One of the most common questions a rape victim hears aside from “What were you wearing?” and “Were you drinking?” and “Why didn’t you fight back?” is “Did you report it to the police?” Despite studies that show that police officers are just as likely as anyone to accept rape myths along the lines that men can’t be raped, that women should be able to fight off rapists if they really want to, and that women are likely to make false rape accusations because they like the attention; and despite statistics that show that only 2 to 3 percent of rapists are ever convicted and jailed; and despite flaws in standard investigative procedures and reports of hundreds of untested rape kits; and despite reports of rapes perpetrated by cops, there still seems to be a perception, maybe perpetuated by Law and Order: SVU, that reporting a rape to the police is the first step in getting justice....

For just a second, set aside the task of deciding whether Stephin Merritt is being sincere or ironic. His preoccupation on most Magnetic Fields songs is anxiety: negotiating the desire to live in public with the crippling fear of it. The new Magnetic Fields album, 50 Song Memoir (Nonesuch), is a triumph on this front—these 50 songs, each assigned to a year of his life, are Merritt’s customary bite-size popcraft pastiches, but he sings more or less directly about himself for once....

The Pitchfork Music Festival turns ten this year—or 11 if you count the Pitchfork-curated Intonation Music Festival in 2005. Intonation brought 27 acts to Union Park for two days, and a weekend pass cost $22; a three-day pass to this year’s festival, which includes 45 acts, cost $150, though it did include a year’s subscription to the website’s new print quarterly, The Pitchfork Review. (Full disclosure: I’m one of several Reader writers who’ve contributed to the Review....

The sort of habitual restaurant-going folk who rarely venture out of the comfortable eating enclaves of River North or Randolph Street—those who wouldn’t dream of visiting dirty old Uptown for a steaming bowl of pho, a pile of spicy minchet abish on injera, or a whiskey at the Green Mill—have faced a lot of challenges lately, with celebrated fine-dining restaurants like Goosefoot, El Ideas, and Elizabeth opening in unfashionable neighborhoods at an alarming rate....

If you’re headed to Lollapalooza, you’ve committed to a weekend’s worth of braving quarter-mile bathroom lines and dodging sweaty adolescents who look like they were bussed through time from a high school in 1992. If you’re older than 21, you’re gonna need a drink. And something to eat too since you’re a responsible(ish) grownup (unlike some people). Whether you’re looking to pregame or postgame, Grant Park is situated near plenty of watering holes and places to grab a bite....

Q: I’m a 54-year-old gay guy living in New York City. I’m into bondage, and I have a profile on Recon with plenty of pictures showing what I’m into. A guy visiting from San Francisco cruised me. He asked me to send a face pic, and I did. He invited me to his hotel. He didn’t have any gear with him, so I stopped at a hardware store and picked up $40 worth of rope and duct tape on my way to meet him....

The other day Damon Locks was at Stateville Correctional Center in suburban Crest Hill, where he teaches art to inmates, when one of the prison’s guards wandered into his classroom. Each of Locks’s 11 students at the all-male maximum-security facility had spent the semester making brief animations with pencils and tracing paper—among the few art supplies allowed in the jail—and the curious guard was trying to get a sneak peek....

For most of the 36 years that the Hadassah House thrift shop occupied a two-story building just west of the Highland Park Metra station, it was a bargain- and treasure-hunter’s bonanza—chock-a-block with carefully used furniture and high-end clothing (along with housewares, jewelry, what-have-you) from homes in the North Shore suburbs, all at pennies-on-the-dollar prices that were almost always negotiable. But earlier this year Hadassah House moved to new quarters in a Deerfield strip mall, where it now sits between a California Tan and Deerfield Dialysis....

In Robert Altman’s 1992 film The Player, a satirical noir thriller about a Hollywood movie studio exec who literally gets away with murder, a minor subplot involves two hustling screenwriters pitching a dark-spirited “independent” picture called Habeas Corpus. It’s a gritty drama about a woman wrongly accused of murder who still fries in the gas chamber, but only after falling in love with her prosecuting attorney, who tragically then manages to produce evidence of her innocence moments after her death....

The Queer Encyclopedia of Music, Dance & Musical Theater (Cleis Press, 2004) defines “opera queen” as “a fan notable for his fetishistic, indeed perhaps obsessive, knowledge of opera plots, productions, and recordings, along with an equally extensive lore of gossip and speculation about the scandals, rivalries, romances, breakdowns, and triumphs in the personal lives of operatic divas.” Terrence McNally’s 1989 tragicomedy The Lisbon Traviata focuses on two such opera queens, Stephen and Mendy—affluent, white, middle-aged New York culture vultures, with apartments in Manhattan, homes in the country, and summer cottages on Fire Island....

The Chef: Mike Bagale (Alinea)The Challenger:Andrew Brochu (The Aviary)The Ingredient: Necco Wafers “I grew up with Skittles and Starburst and Twizzlers, and this thing’s nothing like that,” Bagale said. “These were great flavors in 1847. We’ve moved on from that.” “I’m a little scared, because I don’t like candy,” Bagale said before he tasted his creation. After sampling it, he commented, “It’s kind of how I knew it was going to be—way too sweet for me....