Inside the Hyatt Regency in River North on Friday, I was sitting at a table eating some buffet food when I was joined by some fellow attendees of WhiskyFest Chicago. One woman noticed the notes I was taking, so I explained that I was planning to write about the annual booze-tasting extravaganza. I didn’t mention that exhaustion had already started to set in, but maybe she saw it in my face....

The Reader‘s archive is vast and varied, going back to 1971. Every day in Archive Dive, we’ll dig through and bring up some finds. In 1975, Rode, with the financial support of his wife, Nancy, rented a space across the street from Wrigley Field for $100 a month and opened up “Z Poor Polish Art Museum.” (It is astonishing to think that such a thing could have once existed in Wrigleyville....

Daylight savings time steals an hour from us on Sunday, which can only mean one thing—Lollapalooza is right around the corner! (Also, set your clocks forward, dingbats.) Lolla expands to four days to celebrate its 25th anniversary, and tickets go on sale Tuesday, March 22. Judging from past years, the lineup will be announced in the next couple weeks, and this wolf has some predictions about who will appear. Expect to see James Murphy taking a break from his Williamsburg wine bar to front the reunited LCD Soundsystem....

As we all know by now, 2020 was miserable. Worst year ever—at least in my lifetime. I won’t bother with this year’s lowlights. You lived through it—you know the score. Basically, it was Trump, death, Trump, death, Trump . . . Watching all the big games (Super Bowl, NBA playoffs, World Series) on the big TV screen at the house of Cap, my dear friend who I hardly saw these last few months....

Two weeks ago, Saturday Night Live alum and west-side native Nora Dunn was in rehearsals at Steppenwolf for the title role in The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington, by James Ijames. Directed by Whitney White and featuring Nikki Crawford as Ann, Celeste M. Cooper as Doll, Sydney Charles as Priscilla, Carl Clemons-Hopkins as Davy, Victor Musoni as William, and Travis Turner as Sucky Boy, the show had all the makings of a feverishly watchable slice of history....

It doesn’t really matter if you’re part of a starry-eyed couple or a cynical single; this Valentine’s Day weekend is full of events for the everyone from the hopeless romantic to the just plain hopeless. You can choose from more than 40 shindigs in our complete list of Valentine’s Day events, but here are our 12 favorite options (including a shameless plug for our annual Anti-Valentine’s Day party): I’ll Do Anything to See Boobs Tonight: A Valentine’s Burlesque Cabaret At the stroke of midnight, the Gorilla Tango Burlesque Geek Girls are all set to perform Valentine’s Day-themed solos and group numbers....

“I always think of this coat and vest combination as being almost ‘ninja’ in feeling,” says Jenene Ravesloot, who was photographed while shopping at the Target store on Peterson Avenue in West Ridge. The 76-year-old poet was eager to show the intricate embroidery of her Danny Mansmith pieces—certainly not the only fun items in her wardrobe. “I do think it is important to dress with flair and a sense of humor,” she says....

Those are the words of the late, great Wanda Kurek, proprietress of Stanley’s, the 84-year-old tavern that is the last remaining holdout of Back of the Yards’ Whiskey Row, the once-bustling strip of Ashland Avenue that slaked the thirst of thousands of stockyard workers. When I wrote about Wanda in 2008, she was an 84-year-old spitfire who reigned behind the bar with a sharp tongue. By all accounts she still was at age 95, when she fractured her pelvis walking down the basement stairs....

Had Jafar Panahi not already used the title The Mirror in 1997, he could have applied it to any of the four features he’s made this decade. The Iranian director appears as himself in all four—This Is Not a Film (2011), Closed Curtain (2013), Taxi (2015), and now 3 Faces (2018)—effectively turning the camera on himself as a sort-of mirror. It would be shortsighted, though, to reduce these works with the label of autobiography....

Zach Condon debuted his indie-folk project Beirut in 2005, and though he expanded it from a solo project to a full-fledged band in 2006, he’s continued to work with the same building blocks that made his earliest bedroom recordings so beguiling: sparse ukulele strumming, ornate horn arrangements influenced by eastern European folk music, and arresting vocals that strike a balance between heavenly and funereal. The most noticeable musical evolution on Beirut’s brand-new fifth album, Gallipoli (4AD), is the addition of synthetic, waterlogged Farfisa notes, which open the title track....

Soul and gospel legend Mavis Staples opened her set on Friday at the Pitchfork Music Festival with an Alfred Hitchcock-esque “Good evening,” then proclaimed that she came to bring “joy, happiness, inspiration, and some positive vibrations.” Hopkins has played in bands that have covered Staples’s music, so she knows it well. “I want that hot summer day where everybody’s upset about the government and the way that the world is,” she said, “and she comes out and just sings protest music in the way that only she can and somehow soothes and activates people at the same time....

Leon “Kaleta” Ligan-Majek came into his talents in the early 80s—at exactly the right time to bridge two disparate genres of Nigerian music. Kaleta’s family relocated to Lagos from his native Benin during his adolescence, and after playing guitar and singing in church he began performing professionally throughout Nigeria. While he was still a young man, juju star King Sunny Adé invited him to join his touring group, where he played for about three years in the late 80s....

Zimbabwe-born performance artist Nora Chipaumire never really knew her father, who left her family when she was five. But once she made a name for herself as a dancer-choreographer in New York, she started hearing from other Chipaumires. “The honest answer is yes,” she notes. “Because reconciling my relationship with my father means reconciling my relationship with a black man. And that’s a minefield.”

Elijah McKinnon sees the future of television as revolutionary, fearless, and divine. As the executive director of the inclusive online platform Open Television (OTV), they’ve had exclusive insight into the groundbreaking work of Chicago filmmakers. And after spending the past six months traveling to places like Berlin and Johannesburg to produce OTV’s first international projects, McKinnon is ready to prove that they’re correct about where the medium can go. Along with its established online presence, OTV is using this time to elevate local artists and healers on Instagram, giving them a place to share self-care tips and what they’re working on in isolation....

Saxophonist and composer Darius Jones is at one of the fieriest, most mercurial players on New York’s massive jazz and improvised-music scene—he’s a freedom seeker with a strong sense of history but a healthy disregard for orthodoxy. In brutally precise noise-jazz juggernaut Little Women, a group he cofounded, Jones blows serrated fury alongside Travis Laplante (Battle Trance) over postpunk guitar and drums, and in 2014 he released an album called The Oversoul Manual on which he didn’t play at all, instead enlisting four skilled vocalists to sing his emotionally intense work of post-opera....

Revolutions of the Night, a new documentary about famed outsider artist Henry Darger, begins like a horror movie, as two people investigate the ruins of a long-shuttered state sanatorium for children in central Illinois. With just a flashlight to lead them through the dark, the explorers observe widespread debris, then come upon a room with spattered blood dried on the walls. One senses immediately that terrible things have happened here, and several historians who appear later in the film confirm that children were mistreated at the institution throughout its existence....

A few years ago I was lucky enough to see one of the greatest shows of my lengthy concertgoing life: King Crimson at the Chicago Theatre. Clearly the band thought it was a good one too, as they released the entire show as the album Official Bootleg: Live in Chicago, June 28th, 2017. King Crimson’s long-standing bassist, the godly Tony Levin, was even quoted in the promotional materials calling it “one of our best....

When you can’t outrun your past, one option is to face it with your own poetics. That’s the approach King Woman front woman Kris Esfandiari takes when confronting the Biblical archetypes branded on her psyche while coming of age in a Charismatic Christian family that practiced speaking in tongues and at-home exorcisms. On Celestial Blues, the follow-up to King Woman’s 2017 debut album, Created in the Image of Suffering, Esfandiari and her bandmates weave tales of doom, woe, and resurrection with gilded threads of metal and shoegaze....