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. Fernando, unfortunately, was unavailable. Katy recruited another friend known as Doc to fill the role. Doc was Swedish. If anyone asked, Katy decided they would say he was named Fernando after the Abba song. But no one asked. Logic had no place in the world of Jerry Springer....

Chicago native Maura Walsh is a visual artist and concert enthusiast. This year she raised $37,000 for local music venues battling the financial hardships of the pandemic with Our Tiny Guide to Chicago’s Best Music Culture Spots, which she created in 2019. She’s also working with nonprofit fundraising initiative Support Chicago Arts to launch Tiny Guide to Chicago Arts, which will help an even wider range of local performance spaces....

In July 2008, at the second annual AleFest Chicago at Soldier Field, I came across a bearded man serving beer from a jockey box made from a double-decker Craftsman toolbox. Bearded men weren’t in short supply at the event, but the Craftsman box was new to me, and so was the beer. In fact, it was new to everyone: Metropolitan Brewing, owned and run by Doug (the bearded man) and Tracy Hurst, didn’t even technically exist yet....

LA singer-songwriter Miya Folick sings with such earnestness and power that if for some reason she instructed listeners to stomp on kittens in her lyrics, I’d be tempted to oblige. The sound of her voice and her command over it provide a strong focal point throughout her scattered, occasionally florid debut album, October’s Premonitions (Interscope). Though the post-chillwave indiepop of “Stock Image,” the post-EDM pop-rock of “Freak Out,” and uptown funk of “Leave the Party” glimmer enticingly, with a little stylistic tweaking they could explode....

Julia Thiel The brewing equipment, with ghostly reflections from the dining-room chandeliers University Village’s Moxee Restaurant has included Mad Mouse Brewery since it first opened last May—and the restaurant is named for Moxee City, Washington, the “hops capital of the world”—but until recently the house beers have been brewed in collaboration with Michigan’s Saugatuck Brewing up at the Saugatuck facility. In December, though, Mad Mouse finally got its license, and the shiny brewing equipment that sits behind large windows on one wall of the restaurant became more than just decoration....

I’ve been observing the artistic growth of Haley Fohr since she moved to Chicago in 2012 from Bloomington, Indiana. She’s matured in leaps and bounds since the release of her breakthrough album, In Plain Speech (Thrill Jockey), in 2015, but nothing could have prepared me for her achievements on the remarkable new Reaching for Indigo (Drag City)—which might be the best album I’ve heard in 2017. Early on, Fohr convinced me that she possessed lots of ideas, but at the time she seemed to struggle to sort through them....

When you hear the word community, what do you think about? A group of like-minded individuals? A decent comedy show that put Donald Glover’s acting career on the map? Maybe the word reminds you of a local community center focused around the betterment of human life? All valid answers connected to the word. When I, a born and raised northsider, think about “community,” I think of the numerous neighborhoods I grew up in while moving from apartment to apartment with my mom through the majority of my childhood....

You don’t need to read Nonagon’s bio to understand that the Logan Square trio has a soft spot for the great posthardcore bands that shaped American underground rock in the 80s and early 90s. They make that evident with every note of their long-in-the-works debut album, They Birds (Controlled Burn): it’s wall-to-wall with twisting bursts of husky, half-harmonized vocals, vivifying guitar riffs that perfectly balance acerbic with sweet, and brawny rhythms that inject the melodies with locomotive force....

Lyric Opera creative consultant and iconic soprano Renee Fleming said she was watching The Voice a few years ago when she realized that there’s a mass conversation going on around vocal performance and that “we’ve been left out of this mainstream dialogue.” Starting now, Chicago Voices is seeking proposals from amateur groups for stories arising from their neighborhoods. With professional help and financial support, three winning groups will turn their proposals into polished musical-theater works that’ll have a public premiere next fall....

The backbone of Chicago’s illustrious history of improvised music is made up of a small handful of indefatigable players who endlessly explore and play gigs—sometimes for just a handful of folks—but few have been as long devoted to spontaneous experimentation as keyboardist Jim Baker and percussionist Michael Zerang. Each Tuesday this month at the Hideout they’ve been celebrating their musical relationship, which goes back 35 years. Baker is a jazz-trained master who’s long bridged the divide between Bill Evans and Cecil Taylor, while Zerang, who grew up playing in his father’s Assyrian band, Kismet, has crossed lines between Arabic traditions, free jazz, and theater music, and for decades has served a crucial role as a live music programmer....

Nine years ago, I published a blog entry that casually referred to a lunch I’d had in New York City with a college friend of mine. It was the tiny bread crumb that led the national media to my virtual door one morning last month. I woke up to a barrage of online messages from producers of outlets ranging from NBC News to CCTV (the English-language news channel run by Chinese state broadcaster China Central Television), who targeted my e-mail, Twitter, Facebook—even my LinkedIn account....

There are probably safer plays in the American theater canon than George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s Pulitzer Prize-winning chestnut about a family of eccentrics who do their thing while the rest of the world toils in quiet desperation—but I can’t think of any. First produced in 1936, in the middle of the Great Depression, the play is almost entirely shadow free: no money worries, no personal problems. Even the White Russian refugees fleeing Stalinist terror are happy....

The Obama Foundation, which in recent weeks has reaffirmed its plan to build an aboveground parking garage on parkland at the east end of the Midway Plaisance, did an about-face today, announcing that it “has heard” the voices of protest and will now put the Obama Presidential Center garage underground on land it has already acquired in Jackson Park. The foundation had argued that the aboveground garage would still be parkland because it was to have been covered with grass....

While much of the country was losing its collective mind over the prospect of a President Trump, Chicago’s City Council unanimously passed Mayor Emanuel’s budget. Because the Red Line project will be paid for in part with a TIF. And the city’s official line on TIFs is that they don’t raise property taxes. Even though they do. Having read somewhere that the universe is “constantly expanding,” young Alvy’s concluded that one day it will explode....

A few days after a fire killed 36 people at an Oakland warehouse space called the Ghost Ship in December 2016, Baltimore city officials quickly shut down and condemned the Bell Foundry, a two-story multidisciplinary arts space filled with recording studios and living areas; dozens of tenants were evicted with expedience. While these spaces were thrust into the spotlight as hazards run by the willfully ignorant, they’ve long had a history of importance in underground communities—they offer spaces to the kind of voices who are often barred from traditional venues....

Mark Sagliocco/Getty Images A photo of David Carr taken yesterday evening Earlier in his career, David Carr, the New York Times media columnist who died suddenly Thursday, was editor of Washington’s City Paper, an alt-weekly owned by the Reader. At the time, CNN’s Jake Tapper was a writer there. Tom Yoder, the Reader owner who oversaw Washington remembers: “After Mr. Michaels arrived, according to two people at the bar that night,” wrote Carr, “he sat down and said, ‘watch this,’ and offered the waitress $100 to show him her breasts....

Benjamin Dickinson’s indie comedy Creative Control uses luminous black-and-white cinematography to tell a New York story of two young, white advertising hipsters and the women they cheat on. David, an account executive at a Brooklyn ad agency, feels himself pulling away from his yoga-instructor wife, Juliette, and falling in love with Sophie, the 18-year-old costumer who’s currently sleeping with his randy photographer pal, Wim. There’s also a trendy tech angle: as the movie opens, David lands his company the launch campaign for Augmenta, a new brand of “augmented reality” smart glasses, and in testing out the product, he learns how to incorporate his video capture of Sophie into a lifelike avatar that crawls right onto his lap....

This story was originally published by City Bureau on August 6, 2020. “The communities I represent desperately need relief and the HEROES Act commits over $3 trillion to meet those needs and addresses the serious inequities in previous relief packages,” García said in a statement. BPNC and other local groups like Increase the Peace and Gage Park Latinx Council have found themselves in the business of resource redistribution: accepting cash donations, food donations, baby supplies, bicycles and handing them out to undocumented families, no questions asked....

Theater & Performance The Drawer Boy The three-person cast of this Redtwist production spend two hours swimming upstream. They’ve all delivered convincing performances with the company before, so the problem likely lies in Michael Healey’s belabored script. It starts implausibly: a young actor wandering the Canadian countryside asks a pair of random, reclusive fiftysomething farmers if he can live with them for a while because he’s, um, writing a play about farmers, and they let him right in....