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On June 3, Chicago theater artists flooded my social media with #openyourlobby; a call for theaters around the nation to open their doors to #blacklivesmatter protesters. As the producing artistic director at UrbanTheater Company, a Black and Mexican Chicago native, and mother, this call exposed the truth about our theater community: the privilege of deciding to close our doors and separate ourselves from our neighbors is nonexistent. And yet we are constantly on the precipice of exclusion because of the coming and going of artists seeking to enhance their career, resulting in the gentrification of Chicago theater....

After Jeff Rosenstock was announced to play at Pitchfork last summer, a lot of folks seemed to be looking forward to a train-wreck collision between a scruffy DIY punk who’d spent most of his career giving away his music for free and a big-budget festival crowded with corporate sponsors. Rosenstock also recently signed to Polyvinyl Records, after a couple releases on SideOneDummy—another big change for an artist who insisted for years on giving away his own music and keeping anything remotely corporate at arm’s length....

Stranger than Paradise On Thursday Doc Films presents a screening of Jim Jarmusch’s Down by Law, part of the “Prison Break!: Great Escape Films of the 20th Century” series. A stylish chronicler of cultural malaise and Americanized existentialism, Jarmusch has been making films about “hipsters” long before the word became an amorphously defined marketing phrase. In the spirit of beat literature and John Cassavetes, Jarmusch’s films center on characters firmly situated on the margins of society, outcasts defined by their isolation—self-imposed or otherwise—and fruitless intellectual pursuits....

L ee Grantham, whose new show “Reverse Acrylic Paintings” is at Jean Albano Gallery through February 24, is a Milwaukee-based painter whose work can’t escape the Chicago Imagists’ long shadow. Grantham takes his imagery from instructional manuals, industrial illustrations, and, occasionally, from art history. His Van Gogh tribute, Worth Cutting Your Ear Off For (1991), presents an outline of the artist with bandaged ear, his face blank save for a cartoonish mouth, and pairs him with a similarly featureless bodice- and panty-clad blond....

With his speech last week at a Crain’s business luncheon, Mayor Emanuel made it clear that he’s adopted a new attitude toward Chicago’s public schools: he likes them. In particular, Emanuel is trumpeting gains made in standardized test scores—more on that in a moment—to win points in his fight with Governor Rauner, his old wine-drinking, money-making pal. OK, so Rahm never compared schools to prisons. But he roared into office intent on making his name as a charter-school-loving, teachers’-union-bashing Democrat who stood arm in arm with Republicans like Rauner....

Mike Sula Tamal nejo, La Guerrerense In Cragin, around the intersection of Fullerton and Cicero, there’s a small pocket of businesses that cater to folks hailing from the southwestern Mexican state of Guerrero; specifically a couple of taquerias and a representative office of the state government. Both taquerias, Taqueria Cotzio and La Guerrerense, serve the standard array of antojitos and platillos, including handmade tortillas, but both also serve something on weekends you don’t frequently find anywhere outside of Guerrero itself....

Here’s some of what we recommend for your snowy weekend ahead: Sun 11/12: Indie stalwart Ted Leo returns with The Hanged Man, his first album in seven years. He’ll be at Thalia Hall (1807 S. Allport) tonight. The Reader‘s Leor Galil calls Leo’s new album, ” . . . an accomplished melange that further colors his power-pop sensibilities and gift for multidimensional songwriting.” 8:30 PM, $20-$25For more things to do this weekend—and every day—visit our Agenda page....

The Back Room Deal features radio personality and longtime Reader political writer Ben Joravsky arguing local Chicago politics with Reader staff writer Maya Dukmasova. With sharp wit and stinging analysis, Joravsky and Dukmasova cut through the smoky haze of the elections to offer you a glimpse of the current Chicago races—ward-level and, of course, mayoral. Will these historic elections be determined in back-room deals, like so many in Chicago’s past?...

Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago.

For the better part of 30 years, Pittsburgh band Anti-Flag have made unapologetically confrontational political punk, cranking out fervent, hook-driven diatribes against facism, racism, animal cruelty, the surveillance state, and other social ills. They’ve also walked the walk, using their band as a platform to support a variety of causes (among them Amnesty International, the ACLU, Greenpeace, and Pittsburgh’s Center for Victims of Violence and Crime) and playing free shows at protests and demonstrations, including one outside the 2008 Republican convention....

J.L. Gross moved into the Lathrop Homes, a 925-unit Depression-era public housing complex on the north side, in 1988, two decades after coming back from the Vietnam war with a bullet permanently lodged in his back. He’s lived in six different apartments in the development since then. For years Lathrop was neglected and many buildings stood empty as the Chicago Housing Authority, developers, residents, and the surrounding community negotiated redevelopment plans....

So much for my English degree. I came across medlars, or Mespilus germanica, at the farmers’ market this week, a fruit that was new to me but very familiar to Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, Cervantes, and Rabelais. Its Wikipedia page reads like a syllabus for the Western canon. The medlar was popular among so many dead white writers in part because it’s only edible after it’s bletted, which means you have wait until it rots, which some scribblers saw as a metaphor for prostitution....

Broken Prayer were one of Gossip Wolf’s favorite hardcore bands of the past decade. The defunct local dark punks’ blistering tunes, wrapped in the lamentations of vocalist Scott Plant, fairly drip with deliciously febrile contempt! Since 2016 Plant has been fronting Droids Blood, whose lineup also includes BP drummer Nick Donahue. On their new self-titled tape, they vary the tempos more and even add some borderline poppy hooks, but there’s also lots of grimy, slightly industrial synth gunk and bass murk—”Ceaușescu’s Dream” and “Unreality” sound deranged in the best possible way....

From Bitter Lake, a firsthand account of war-torn Afghanistan “Increasingly we live in a world where nothing makes any sense. Events come and go like waves of a fever, leaving us confused and uncertain. Those in power tell us stories to help us make sense of the complexity of reality, but those stories are increasingly unconvincing and hollow. This is a film about why those stories have stopped making sense and how that led us in the west to become a destructive and dangerous force in the world....

Q: My best friend’s father is an avid user of social media. He’s retired and spends most of his day posting memes on Facebook and Instagram. Recently, I realized he might not know how Instagram works. I noticed over the past week or so that he has been following, liking, and commenting on a lot of Instagram pictures of young gay men. I don’t think he realizes that anyone who follows him can see that activity....

Welcome to the Reader’s morning briefing for Thursday, June 2, 2016. Capturing the vibrancy of Rogers Park in photos Rogers Park is the city’s most diverse neighborhood. Photographer Joshua Lott has captured the community that he grew up in and resides in now through his This Is Rogers Park project. Chicago magazine is showcasing some of his favorite photos. [Chicago]

History has been so indifferent to Swedish hardcore pioneers Crude S.S. (short for “Society System”) that when the trio’s own members get a little foggy on the details, it’s hard to find any evidence to clear things up. The official Facebook page for this fiercely subversive band—who made a kiss-off song about our money-grubbing society called “Destroy Capitalism”—says the group formed in 1980, but earlier this month they began selling T-shirts emblazoned with the words “Swedish HC since 1979....

In the relationship between musician and listener, seduction is an overrated quality; isn’t the idea that an artist has to woo their audience to welcome them and create a sense of intimacy kind of degrading? On her 2018 album, Working Class Woman (Ninja Tune), Canadian electronic producer and singer Marie Davidson seems to suggest that a far better option is to foreground a shared, deeply felt sense of disgust. The record’s opening triptych—“Your Biggest Fan,” “Work It,” and “The Psychologist”—pairs modular synth workouts with arrhythmic, sneering rambles about the high-pressure insanities experienced by touring electronic musicians....

On January 22, the City Council’s public safety committee held a five-and-a-half hour Zoom hearing on carjackings, a crime that has surged across the country since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. Last year Chicago had more than 1,400 carjackings—800 more than in 2019, and the highest it’s been in two decades. News about these attacks were on TV and in the papers nearly every day. “Three CPD Officers Wounded In Shootout With Carjacking Suspect,” CBS2 reported in July....