Dick DeMarsico/Library of Congress Sarah Simmons, a relatively unknown midwife, honored Dr. King by standing up to the mayor. To commemorate the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., Sarah Simmons decided to crash an interfaith breakfast and denounce Mayor Emanuel’s school policies. The interfaith breakfast is a command performances for civic Chicago that’s sponsored by BMO, Walmart, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, United Airlines, and several other corporate titans. Just saying . ....

To paraphrase Martha and the Vandellas, summer’s here and the time is right for sitting in the seats. Chicago’s conventional theater season may still (roughly) follow the September-to-June academic calendar, but festivals have burgeoned­—along with outdoor Shakespeare—to fill up the warm-weather down period. For example: A physical theater festival called Physical ran here earlier this month, as did the Drekfest rotten-play competition. The three-day Abbie Hoffman Died for Our Sins performance marathon begins this Friday....

Gil Leora There’s nary a coffee shop or bar in Chicago these days that doesn’t display the Windy City Rollers’ league poster in their window come derby season. Even those who have never been to a bout are well aware of the group of bad-ass girls who are slamming into each other on four wheels. Some people have even turned to derby as a recreational fitness regimen (OK, I’m totally talking about myself here)....

When we heard “David Bowie Is” was coming to the Museum of Contemporary Art, there was no way we were not going to go. It was a moral obligation for Bowie superfan Brianna Wellen, and Aimee Levitt was curious if the exhibit would be the revolutionary combination of sight and sound it was hyped to be. BW: The “Starman” setup was particularly wonderful for that because it incorporated the song, the video, and the costume....

Soundtracks I spend quite a bit of time at my desk listening to music through plugged-in earbuds. When I’m working, my favorite type of music is the kind that’s intense enough to fuel productivity and hypnotic enough to zone out. For this reason I spend a lot of time at work listening to Miles Davis, Steve Reich, John Coltrane, and plenty of electronic music. Lately I’ve added one of my favorite bands, German rock group Can, to the mix....

Late in this documentary about the Afrobeat legend Fela Kuti, the musician’s longtime manager, Rikki Stein, recalls the time he traveled to the U.S. to meet with every major record label on behalf of his client and was invariably asked, “Which three minutes out of that 28-minute song do you want me to put on the radio?” Kuti’s tunes typically began with a percussionist laying down an irrepressibly funky beat, then the guitarist adding some edgy riff, then the other players joining in one by one until a brass fanfare elevated the music to the next level of drama; over the course of a half hour or more, the song built, peaked, and subsided like the plot of a movie....

Superintendent Garry McCarthy has begun the process to fire Dante Servin, the veteran police detective who fatally shot 22-year-old Rekia Boyd nearly three years ago in North Lawndale and set off months of protests. In September, the Independent Police Review Authority (IPRA), recommended Servin be fired. McCarthy had 90 days from that ruling to accept or reject the agency’s recommendation. Protesters have packed Police Board meetings for months, even shutting down the August meeting, criticizing McCarthy’s for the protracted process to fire Servin, who has been on the force since 1991....

“Three shots closed Texas Guinan’s show at the Green Mill cafe, Lawrence avenue and Broadway, at 4 o’clock yesterday morning. The internationally known night club hostess was asking the suckers to give the little girl a big hand.” —Chicago Tribune, March 24, 1930 The Mill’s Jazz Age pedigree has no equal in Chicago. Newspaper accounts of the era tell a lively tale of the locals’ proclivities and personalities. Jack “Machine Gun” McGurn, a Capone associate, supposedly owned part of the club during Prohibition, when tunnels under the bar were used to smuggle in booze, and kept a table reserved for his boss (walk into the bar, past the booths on the north wall, and it’s the first one you run into, positioned so you can see both entrances)....

Since this Atlanta blackened-death quartet released its 2010 LP Dualitas half of its lineup has changed. Departing guitarist Dylan Kilgore was replaced by Ethan McCarthy of Primitive Man, and bassist Mike Longoria passed the torch to Colin Marston, who’s played in an impressive list of bands that includes Behold the Arctopus, Dysrhythmia, and Gorguts. So is there still much continuity between last year’s Grief Relic (Seasons of Mist) and Dualitas? Yes....

Nearly a decade ago, totemic German free-jazz reedist Peter Brötzmann told me that he’d recently played with an exciting bassist. Those aren’t words you often hear from Brötzmann—he’d once explained that he wants a bassist to “just be there,” by which he meant occupy a certain place in the music and not do anything too fancy. “Oh, and he plays with Marsalis,” Brötzmann said. “So what.” Eric Revis was indeed (and still is) a member of the Branford Marsalis Quartet, where he’s “been there” (and a lot more) for north of 20 years....

Q I’m a 26-year-old lesbian 18 months out of an eight-year relationship. She was my first girlfriend. I do not want to be in another monogamous relationship. I want to have a couple of sex buddies or, preferably, a couple of friends with benefits. In the last 18 months, I have had three FWB “arrangements” with different girls. The problem is, about two or three months in, each girl developed serious like/love feelings and began talking about a future together and how they want to be with me exclusively....

On the evening of Friday, July 28, while the temperature outside hung in the low 70s, the Portage Theater was an enormous steam bath. When I got there just before ten, a thick layer of haze hovered above the roughly 1,400 fans packed into the hall—in retrospect I’m sure it was mostly weed smoke, but my first thought was that the humidity in the room had literally formed a cloud. I’m just 31, but I looked to be one of the oldest people there—many of the dozen rappers who performed that night have audiences who on average are barely past voting age....

This weekend local music blogs Chicago Singles Club, Notes & Bolts, Midwest Action, Loud Loop Press, Frontier Psychiatrist, and Local Loop have joined forces to put together the ElSounds Fest, a massive two-day lineup of Chicago bands taking place at both Cole’s and Cafe Mustache in Logan Square. On Sat 8/23, the festival is headlined by spazzy garage trio Absolutely Not at Cole’s, with other highlights including rowdy punks Velocicopter, avant-pop group Mines, and sleazy glam band Flesh Panthers....

David Stieber Team Englewood’s poets (from left to right): David Holmes, Alicia Hincon, Dallas Battle, and Kenyatta Tolbert I’m always ripping Mayor Emanuel about this, that, and the other thing, so today I thought I’d show him some love—like I were an alderman or a member of his board of education. You know, this might be a theme the mayor champions when he promotes the local arts scene at next year’s South by Southwest conference in Austin—as he did at this week’s event....

Kevin Warwick,Reader associate editor Thee Oops, Happy Charlie (Slovenly) Two 45s, ten tracks—be ready to flip a record every three minutes. These dudes from Sardinia (the big Italian island that’s not Sicily) play breakneck punk whose filthy, snarling guitar licks don’t add flair so much as hard-nosed attitude. A cover of “Egg Raid on Mojo” from Some Old Bullshit does more than hint at the band’s ultimate respect for the Beastie Boys’ hardcore-­punk genes (and reminds me that I should unearth my copy of Aglio e Olio)....

Firecakes Donuts The offerings at Firecakes Today, the first Friday in June, would probably be one of our most celebrated national holidays if anybody knew about it: it’s National Doughnut Day. Remember that. Program it into your calendar for next year. And then solemnly observe by eating the best doughnut you can find. If you need a holy text, pick up food historian Michael Krondl’s new book, The Donut: History Recipes and Lore from Boston to Berlin....

Michael Mina is one of those high-wattage celebrity chefs whose light shines so bright it makes me turn away. Didn’t really know much about the guy. Didn’t really care to. But he is a prolific restaurateur, with more than 30 spots to his name in ten states (plus D.C. and Dubai), so I suppose it was inevitable he would open one here, and that would be how I’d finally begin to get to know the food of Michael Mina....

As Mastodon worked their way from the underground into the realm of radio metal over the past decade or so, the evolution of their expansive, florid sound never felt painfully labored—rather it’s been more gradual and predictable. Since their record of record Leviathan, the Atlanta band’s forceful, heavy dual-guitar sludge riffing has been a bit buried beneath heady noodling and, at times, a vocal sheen that sounds ripped straight from an Incubus album....

The Rover Robert Altman biographer Patrick McGilligan called Corn’s-A-Poppin’ (1955) “one of the worst movies ever made”; Kian Bergstrom of Cine-File declares, “I love no musical in the world more than [Corn’s-A-Poppin’].” You can decide for yourself on Monday when Music Box presents the Chicago premiere of a new restoration of the movie, which Altman cowrote when he was still cranking out 16-millimeter industrials in Kansas City. Our feature story on the restoration project is here, along with recommended reviews for Ai Weiwei: The Fake Case, a documentary about the Chinese dissident; The Illumination, Krzysztof Zanussi’s 1973 drama about a physics student in search of enlightenment; The Rover, an Australian thriller starring Guy Pearce and directed by David Michod (Animal Kingdom); and To Kill This Love, a 1972 Polish drama screening at Gene Siskel Film Center as part of the ongoing series Martin Scorsese Presents: Masterpieces of Polish Cinema....

Over his lengthy career guitarist Alan Licht has covered lots of disparate terrain, whether playing naif indie rock in Love Child or creating works of conceptual sound art as he did on his 2003 album A New York Minute (XI). He’s an inveterate explorer with a deep historical sensibility, and he also writes about music with impressive clarity and unfussy analysis, but he’s never allowed his knowledge and respect for the past to confine his own work....