Almost everyone has done something and/or someone they regret doing—although it’s possible your ex-girlfriend doesn’t regret fucking her married boss for three years, SAAD, and it’s possible there’s no need for regret. Sometimes people have affairs for all the right reasons. Sometimes abandoning a spouse and/or breaking up a home with kids in it, aka “doing the right thing” and divorcing, is the worse choice. Life is long and complicated, and it’s possible for a person to demonstrate loyalty and commitment with something other than their genitals....

He moved with a feral grace, with a heat that blazes through the grain of the film that remains, with a virtuosity that never disguises—but rather illuminates—the sheer risk of dance, the insolence of a human daring to flout the laws of gravity, time, and space to attain a momentary immortality. He lived with furious energy, inspiring multitudes, consorting with celebrities, infuriating authorities. “He was Mick Jagger before Mick Jagger. ....

Courtesy of Thelonious Martin’s Facebook page Thelonious Martin Kanye West isn’t the only local hip-hop artist receiving a degree this month. Chicago producer Thelonious Martin is in the middle of his final week of classes at Columbia College; with the exception of a single summer course he’s aiming to take online, he’ll have his degree in music business very soon. It’s the latest milestone the 22-year-old has achieved in recent months....

Amanda Harth, founder of Runwayaddicts, an online resource for the local fashion industry, is determined to give a leg up to local designers beyond the well-known names (Virgil Abloh, Joe Freshgoods of Fat Tiger Workshop, etc) and neighborhoods (downtown, Wicker Park-Bucktown). At last weekend’s two-day pop-up Museum of Streetwear in East Garfield Park, she showcased a dozen mostly south-side brands at the airy Lab on Lake. Among the standouts: Gabriella Meyer of Denimcratic, who uses dye and distressing treatments among techniques to give her fabrics unique details....

Last Labor Day, Jesus “Chuy” Garcia spent four hours at Karen Lewis’s house, discussing her plan to run against Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Garcia, 58, is a Cook County Board commissioner and a former alderman and state senator; Lewis, 61, is the fiery president of the Chicago Teachers Union. He’s Mexican-American; she’s African-American and Jewish. “We were strategizing her victory path,” Garcia told me recently. “We talked plenty about conditions in the Latino community....

It’s spring cookbook season, and there’s a lot of noteworthy pulp by local authors out and about. You’ve already heard about the wonders of The Kefir Cookbook by Julie Smolyansky. In a week or two I’ll take a look at Korean BBQ by Bill Kim and Plate magazine editor Chandra Ram. There’s also Craft Coffee by Jessica Easto, which actually came out last year (I’ve been sleeping on it). But last weekend I spent some time with Risotto & Beyond by gentleman chef and fennel pollen maestro John Coletta of Quartino fame, along with Monica Kass Rogers and the late Nancy Ross Ryan....

Prolific musician Kahil El’Zabar has hardly gone unnoticed, but I wish every music fan knew about this living legend. The son of a drummer, El’Zabar was born Clifton Blackburn in Chicago in 1953, and raised on the city’s south side. He joined the Association of the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) at age 18, and attended Kennedy-King, Malcolm X, and Lake Forest colleges before traveling to Africa in 1973 to study African music at the University of Ghana....

Chicago has enough hang-ups about hot dogs. The last thing our homegrown dog Nazis need to do is get into Detroit’s business. But that’s precisely what Humboldt Park’s Lola’s Coney Island confronts Chicago with: Detroit-style hot dogs, which were established neither in Detroit nor New York, but more likely in Fort Wayne, Indiana, the home of the oldest operating coney purveyor anywhere. Fort Wayne’s Famous Coney Island Wiener Stand was opened 106 years ago by Macedonian immigrants who, like many of their kind, trafficked in a hot dog delivery system that featured a mildly spiced natural casing wiener blanketed in a beanless but hearty chili sauce....

It was hot and crowded at Mark Kirk’s election-night watch party. Meanwhile, a TV tucked behind the food and drink buffet, and tuned to Fox news, brought word that Trump was winning in Florida and Rubio was giving up. Coleman, who’s aiding Kirk with his urban outreach, said he favors Rubio in the presidential race. Rubio just dropped out? “Then I’ve gotta go with Cruz,” he said. It was close to 8 PM when Kirk was helped to the podium....

Since the late 70s, veteran Chicago blues harpist Billy Branch has been leading workshops and student concerts with the Blues in the Schools program, teaching elementary and high school kids in Chicago and around the country. And he likes to start his classes with a call-and-response ritual: “The blues are the facts of life!” The Palm Tavern—or Gerri’s Palm Tavern, as the bar at 446 E. 47th Street became known—wasn’t a blues club....

About midway through Julie Ganey’s one-woman show, the author-star describes trying to make her Trump-supporting father change his views. Her dad, she repeatedly tells the audience, taught logic and philosophy and instilled in his children the importance of objectivity and critical thinking. Ganey describes spending hours trying to use these techniques on her father. They don’t work. When the Ferguson riots come up, Ganey’s father says of Michael Brown, who was shot and killed by a police officer, “That kid in Ferguson wasn’t a good kid....

Prashant Gupta/FX Timothy Olyphant is back as U.S. marshal Raylan Givens. Justified is back, but not for long—the sixth and final season of the FX show premiered Tuesday night to both my delight and dismay. It was great to see the show in top form again, but that means there are only 12 episodes left overall, and that means my future TV Tuesday nights are looking pretty empty (I can’t even look at you right now, Parks and Recreation)....

Loading up a Meth. song is a prelude to being viscerally blasted; the local six-piece, which debuted in 2017 with The Children Are Watching, operate at full boil 100 percent of the time as they blend power noise, metal, mathcore, hardcore, and straight-up screaming. In 2018, founder Seb Alvarez (Cadence Fox, Tweak) told the blog Open Mind Saturated Brain that he’s always wanted to call a project Meth. because of the word’s dark, uncontrolled implications....

All of us have been witness to the slow erasure of a once legendary building. Often these structures appear to have been resuscitated by their inevitable transition into something vapid like a boutique dental office, a pet grooming salon, or a chain restaurant, when really, they’ve entered the Sunken Place. The building at 1449 S. Michigan, once the headquarters of the groundbreaking recording company Vee-Jay Records, had indeed seen its share of dark days; but now it’s home to the not-for-profit Overflow Coffee....

An estimated 12,000 people marched in downtown Chicago on July 13 to protest the Trump administration’s immigration policies. Photographer Philip Lindsey was there. v PHOTOS: Take Action to End Criminalization, Detention, and Deportations

If you’re a fan of Pink Floyd’s most iconic albums, such as Animals and The Wall, you may have plunked down some cash to see Roger Waters in his solo show or caught David Gilmour the last time he was in town. But if you’ve got an appetite for Floyd’s early trippy material, drummer Nick Mason (aka “the heartbeat of Pink Floyd”) might be more your cup of tea. He’s currently touring as the leader of a quintet billed as Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets, which includes Spandau Ballet guitarist Gary Kemp, longtime Pink Floyd touring bassist Guy Pratt, guitarist Lee Harris, and keyboardist Dom Beken....

On March 11, prolific Chicago rapper Adamn Killa debuted a new dance on Triller that he calls “Hit the Adamn,” performing it to a sample of his new song of the same name. In the clip, Adamn cocks his arm at a 90-degree angle and leans his shoulder to one side, then makes sharp crouching movements in response to the track’s thundering, minimal bass—it’s simple enough, but the connection of the song to the dance is so unpredictable that I can’t imagine anybody actually learning it....