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. It gets better from there. Go on, it’s only the first day of February. We all need a laugh today. Where are cultural doomsayers like William Bennett and Donald Wildmon when you really need them? How come they’re not on Larry King every night denouncing this sinister subversion of American values and demanding that we break off diplomatic relations with Great Britain?...

A couple days ago, Reader culture editor Tal Rosenberg tweeted about noticing that the Meat Puppets had played the house band in the 1990 pilot for Beverly Hills 90210. I’ve never seen that show, but at that time the Arizona trio were in transition—they’d released their final album for SST, Monsters, the year before, and would drop their major-label debut, Forbidden Places (London), a year later. I haven’t listened to the three albums the Meat Puppets made for London in a very long time, but I remember liking them—including 1994’s Too High to Die, which went gold....

And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out . . . —Matthew 18:9 Shylock is, of course, the iconic Jewish moneylender. He’s made his fortune letting ducats at interest, and just about every character onstage damns and abuses him for it—including his daughter, Jessica, who, as played here by Phoebe Pryce (yes, Jonathan’s daughter), seems to find her very proximity to him excruciating. Excruciating enough, in fact, that she takes radical steps to distance herself from him....

One of my favorite recordings from 2013 was the second album by the trio of veteran drummer Albert “Tootie” Heath and relative young guns Ethan Iverson and Ben Street (on piano and bass, respectively). Tootie’s Tempo (Sunnyside) turned the spotlight on the percussionist, one of the last great proponents of bop playing; but he’s a musician capable of so much more. The trio’s first recording was a terrific but loose live session from the New York club Smalls; the second release captured the group melding into a working ensemble, essaying a wide variety of standards drawn from the entirety of jazz history, with Heath given the latitude to explicitly impart his personality in every performance....

One of the handiest things about ideals is how they offer an easy way around an impossible choice. That’s the big reason I’m suspicious of them. Instead, the Tribune endorsed Johnson. Its logic ran along feel-good lines. “We offer this endorsement to encourage voters who want to feel comfortable with their choice,” said its editorial page. “Who want to vote for someone they can admire.” The Tribune is 169 years old but—I don’t know—when the company became Tronc in June, it may have entered a second childhood....

I don’t want to make overblown claims for Loy Webb’s new play, The Light. It’s got its problems. You could argue, for starters, that it’s not really a play at all but a 90-minute teaching moment on the subjects of race and gender—and, given its extraordinary idealism, an act of wish fulfillment, as well. Webb’s characters are supposed to be average people, a school principal and a firefighter, yet they make choices that seem absurdly noble to a cynic like me....

New York trio Forma promised some changes with Physicalist, their 2016 debut for Kranky Records, but while it’s a retreat from the techno flirtations they served up on their 2014 EP Cool Haptics (The Bunker New York), the first half of the album offers a familiar approach. Sharpening up the basic MO of their 2011 self-titled debut and 2012 album Off/On (both on Spectrum Spools), they place a pop focus on late Kosmische tools and the pioneering synthesizer music of Laurie Spiegel, deploying an array of synthesized sounds—rubbery post-Kraftwerk synth arpeggios over rolling bass tones and driving, uncluttered dance beats—using tactics common in 70s and early 80s electronic music....

Courtesy of Cuneiform Records Mike Osborne A number of factors explain why the remarkable British saxophonist Mike Osborne isn’t better know in the US— various illnesses, including schizophrenia and lung cancer (which eventually killed him in 2007), as well as the fact that he never worked in any meaningful capacity with American players during his peak years in the 60s and 70s. He stepped away from music for good in 1982, but over the preceding half-decade he struggled to maintain a career....

Famous—or notorious—overnight, the recent letter to University of Chicago students from the dean of students letting them know “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” had no place on campus set off the best kind of debate. Neither side’s completely right or completely wrong and both value a good education. Where they disagree is primarily in their perspectives—always a good thing to compare. Back in the day at the University of Missouri (which, I concede, I easily sentimentalize), college itself was thought of as a safe space, a place where it was safe to be an atheist or a Trotskyite or an unwashed bum....

The first time Kenyan singer-songwriter J.S. Ondara heard the music of Bob Dylan, he was blown away. As a bow-tie-wearing, poetry-writing teenager, Ondara often felt out of place among his peers, but listening to America’s most famous folk troubadour inspired him to set his own verses to music. In 2013, at age 20, Ondara won a U.S. green-card lottery and moved in with an aunt in Minneapolis, where he took up acoustic guitar (he chose the city in part because it’s located in Dylan’s home state of Minnesota)....

For 25 years, Tim Kinsella has led his band Joan of Arc through a multitude of changes: members have come and gone, and the group’s sound has evolved and (occasionally) purposely devolved. Now, with the release of Tim Melina Theo Bobby, Kinsella is bringing the project to an end. Named for the musicians who comprise the final Joan of Arc lineup, Tim Melina Theo Bobby is a fitting eulogy for the band that also serves as an entry point into their sprawling discography....

Think The Dukes of Hazzard meets Night of the Living Dead, but more reliant on stereotype than the former and minus the gruesome tension or production values of the latter. This is the general gist/aesthetic of Three Crows’ pretentiously plodding Language of Angels. Naomi Iizuka’s 80-minute drama features a group of vowel-drawling, gun-toting, beer-guzzling, speed-shooting, trailer-living, car-wrecking strippers and sheriffs and good ol’ boys, fighting and smoking and boozing in a cave, and perhaps a mountain ledge as well....

On Friday night I was up so late reading—making the best of my election-related insomnia—that when the networks started calling it for Biden around 10:30 the next morning, I was still asleep. Though I’d been spending a truly inadvisable amount of time on Twitter, I didn’t learn Trump had lost from the Internet. Instead I was woken up by crowds of people screaming for joy in the street, honking their car horns, and banging pots and pans....

Since 2008, photo crew GlitterGuts have been key documenters of Chicago’s nightlife scene. They’ve brought their cameras to Zine Fest, Girls Rock! Chicago events, nearly all of Beauty Bar’s happenings, and practically every show by turbocharged cabaret collective the Fly Honeys—if a GlitterGuts photographer had a booth set up, you knew you were at a great party. The pandemic’s destruction of nightlife has of course hurt GlitterGuts too—for the past 11 months, they’ve relied on portraits and the occasional outdoor event....

While it took me almost six months to get to it, Chicago stubbornly avoided the modern Israeli cuisine movement in the United States for more than a decade after its primary domestic proponent, Michael Solomonov, opened Zahav in Philadelphia in 2008. It’s even better at Galit. Just as at Shaya, the first role of the pita is performative: the sight of these steaming, charred ovoids is preceded by their fresh, yeasty smell wafting across the dining room....

Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place.

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Friday January 22, 2016. Have a great weekend! High school choir escapes bus fire, still wins competition Members of Wheaton Warrenville South High School’s show choir were en route to a competition in Wisconsin Friday when one of their buses burst into flames. Everyone escaped unharmed, and in a display of remarkable fortitude, they choir still went on to win the competition. [Tribune]

Andrea Bauer Left to right: door painting by Kara W.; the roof ring Andrea Bauer