Q: I’m a queer girl living with a male partner. This weekend, we found ourselves in an after-hours club, made some new friends, and ended up at a house with two other guys and a girl. Things were pretty playful with everyone except for one of the guys. We all wanted him gone, but he wouldn’t take the hint. He bought the booze for the afterparty, so we were a little unsure of the etiquette of asking him to leave....

The teen sex comedy was once a major box office draw. During the 80s, movies like Porky’s and Revenge of the Nerds grossed millions despite the fact that most teen sex comedies told the same basic story. The formula was simple: male virgin seeks deflowering, preferably with the help of his hard-partying chums and at the hands of the community’s most desired woman. Armed with this familiar premise, whose roots reached back to English Restoration theater, a writer could forgo the usual story and character development and spend most of his time concocting gags and comic set pieces....

Matthew Lux’s Communication Arts Quartet September 21 Matthew Lux is the Kevin Bacon of Chicago music, connected to just about every important living player in the city. He’s been a key presence in local jazz, rock, soul, and dance-music circles since graduating from Lane Tech in 1991, but it’s taken him till now to release his first album as a leader. Contra/Fact (Astral Spirits) presents a brooding jazz quartet with trumpeter Ben Lamar Gay, drummer Mikel Patrick Avery, and reedist Jayve Montgomery, and tonight the band plays in its honor....

Courtesy the iO The Armando cast of 1995, the same year the iO’s Clark Street location opened With a major move right around the corner, iO founder Charna Halpern recently announced the final performance at the improv theater’s Wrigleyville location. Come July 20, everything will be packed up and ready for 1501 N. Kingsbury, a space that’s easily more than double the current theater’s size. But before starting a new chapter in iO’s story, a proper send-off is required for the hallowed halls that have been the stomping grounds of some of comedy’s most talented performers for nearly 25 years....

Curtain up on the Joffrey’s third season of Christopher Wheeldon’s Nutcracker, which resituates the popular Christmas ballet in Chicago during the 1893 Columbian Exposition. In his note to the program, artistic director Ashley Wheater quotes historian Peter Bacon Hales: “The White City is a utopian city, a model for redefining modern urban life.” However, Wheater doesn’t get to the end of the paragraph: “But it was doomed to decay and disappearance: its best hope ....

A couple weeks ago I DJed a Friday-night party before a friend’s wedding the following day. Even though I played various funk, disco, hip-hop, R&B, indie rock, and new wave, the song that got the most people excited and dancing was Lucinda Williams‘s 1988 song “Passionate Kisses,” from her self-titled album. That’s because it’s one of the best songs ever made, at least in its original version. In the early 90s Mary Chapin Carpenter covered the song and it landed on the Billboard Hot 100 (at number 57) and Hot Country Songs (at number four) charts, but her version is dumb....

Don’t forget Ida B. Wells Wells lived in Chicago for many years, at 36th and King Drive, and became the namesake of the city’s first public housing development for black families. With the destruction of the projects her name was erased from the city’s landscape. For the last ten years, Duster has been fundraising to build a monument in Bronzeville to preserve Wells’s memory—often at the expense of her own identity, since most people want to talk to her only about her great grandmother and seem to overlook that she, Michelle, a writer and lecturer at Columbia College, is her own woman....

Michael Brosilow Martha Lavey, pictured with John Heard in 2006, is stepping down as Steppenwolf’s artistic director. Here, in edited form, is part two of a conversation I had with Steppenwolf Theatre artistic director Martha Lavey, apropos of the news that she’ll be stepping down from her post in 2015. Part one deals mainly with why she’s leaving a job she’s had for 20 years. In this bit, we try to get a handle on the term institution....

The minute Rihanna jacked some aquamarine imagery from seapunk for her performance on Saturday Night Live in the fall of 2012 it was pretty clear that the electronic URL microscene wouldn’t be the same thing it was when it broke on Tumblr the previous year. That hasn’t stopped me from counting “seapunks” at festivals* and it also hasn’t stopped the scene’s originators from moving on. Take seapunk blogfather Ultrademon, who recently released his second album, Voidic Charms; the tune that’s caught my ear is “Drive U Crazy,” a track that reminds me more of house than seapunk (even though seapunk incorporates elements of house)....

An attempt at a clever conceit, Red Theater’s An Oak Tree pairs two actors, one who has rehearsed the script (an engaging Gage Wallace), and another who has never seen the material before. The second actor changes with every performance; I saw the talented Cruz Gonzalez-Citadel. The setup, opening with a recording of “O Fortuna” from Carmina Burana, implies dramatic risk; that the visiting actor is flying without a safety net opens up the possibility for surprising discoveries or agonizing mistakes....

Last Tuesday, just before the Chicago Police Department released the video of officer Jason Van Dyke shooting 17-year-old Laquan McDonald to death, the Chicago Public Schools sent out a letter to all parents and guardians. Signed by chief education officer Janice K. Jackson, it announced that the video would not be shown in CPS schools but that counseling would be available for traumatized students and a “toolkit” was being prepared for students to initiate conversations at home....

OK, it’s not technically a peninsula, but it sure feels like it. The 199-acre park is tucked just south of where the Calumet River flows into Lake Michigan, behind a proud old residential part of the East Side neighborhood. Trails weave through its fields and woods, around playgrounds and tennis courts, and on a midafternoon jaunt the city seems far away—even though you can see the downtown skyline from spots along the lake, and the Horseshoe Casino and steel mills along the shore to the southeast....

All sorts of musicians have cut their teeth performing in unconventional DIY spaces: claustrophobic basements, dilapidated lofts, shuttered stores, old churches. Sometimes these artists are merely unknown, but in other cases they stay underground by choice—they prefer this community of volunteer-run spaces to the regular circuit of for-profit venues, with their occasionally gun-shy bookers and heavy reliance on alcohol sales. I talked with five people from four Pitchfork acts about their experiences in Chicago DIY: Ogbonnaya, Byrne, Winters, Marshall, and Marshall’s bandmate and husband, Mick Fansler....

Jennifer McLaughlin The Hartford Courant still produces excellent journalism, but how will it fare under newly spun off Tribune Publishing? The Tribune Company, fresh out of bankruptcy, has just spun off its eight daily newspapers into a corporation all their own: Tribune Publishing. I was curious about the Courant because unlike the Tribune and LA Times, it isn’t a Tribune paper that a deep-pocketed mogul—such as Eli Broad, Rupert Murdoch, or the Koch brothers—has been rumored to want to buy....

Since last year a cohort of underground rappers with a penchant for aggro instrumentals, histrionic lyrics, and face tattoos has been attracting a lot of national media attention—in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Ringer, Pitchfork, Complex, and elsewhere. In June 2017 Times critic Jon Caramanica popularized the term “Soundcloud rap” to describe a scene that included Trippie Redd, Lil Peep, Lil Pump, and XXXTentacion. The New Yorker‘s coverage, on the other hand, has opted for a name that says more about the music than about its delivery platform: “Emo rap....

With Chicago’s public schools so broke that Mayor Rahm Emanuel decided to close 50 of them last year, you’d think the City Council would have more on its agenda than Eliot Ness, a crime fighter during Prohibition in the 1920s and 30s. Yet I can think of a million reasons the expansion should be put on hold. For starters, the more money the mayor spends building new charters, the less money he has for existing schools that are already so broke they’re worried about paying for toilet paper....

There’s plenty to do this week. Here’s some of what we recommend: Tue 3/28: Taco Tuesday at Lagunitas Brewery (1843 S. Washtenaw), which includes tacos from Taqueria Los Comales and music by Pool Holograph, raises funds for Deborah’s Place, an organization that provides support for homeless women. 5:30 PM Tue 3/28: This month the Girl Talk, the talk show that features “Chicago women doing cool things,” invites Cook County state’s attorney Kim Foxx to discuss topics such as working in the male-dominated justice system at the Hideout (1354 W....

Hate is a powerful motivator for Kyle Abraham. And the New York-based choreographer doesn’t shy from putting it front and center in “When the Wolves Came In,” a trio of dances whose title refers to the 1960 protest album We Insist! Freedom Now Suite by jazz drummer and composer Max Roach and singer-songwriter Oscar Brown Jr. Set to a score that ranges from Nico Muhly to spirituals and designed by artist Glenn Ligon, the striking work incorporates projections “of incidents that were racially charged, racially questionable,” says Vinson Fraley, a member of the choreographer’s company Abraham....

I know it’s perverse to compile a year-end list of concerts (“Want to hear about some great stuff you probably didn’t see?”), but please consider these as ongoing recommendations—all five bands below will slay your face no matter when you catch up with them. I left off some truly spectacular shows to avoid repeating previous years’ lists, among them Arkona, Godflesh, Yob, and Ghost (who turned out to make surprisingly good date music)....

Krystyna Janda stars in Interrogation Tomorrow night at 6:30 PM Cinema/Chicago will present a free screening of Polish filmmaker Ryszard Bugajski’s period drama Interrogation at the Cultural Center. The film should hold special interest for anyone who attended the classic Polish cinema series at the Siskel Center in May and June, as Interrogation can be viewed as a coda to the era of filmmaking (roughly the late 1950s to the early ’80s) covered by that retrospective....