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In late September, two days before the first inspection for Mousetrap, the new taproom from Off Color Brewing, water is leaking from one of the five enormous casks that occupy nearly an entire room at the front of the building. The 15-year-old former Barolo wine barrels, known as foeders, recently made the long journey here from an Italian wine cellar and need to be hydrated and checked for leaks. The one that’s dribbling water onto the ground has an improperly seated gasket that will need to be fixed; another, currently sitting empty, has cracks between the wooden staves big enough that you can see light through them if you stick your head inside the barrel....

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. Within a few years the band was frequently playing at the Lewis Institute, where Tough was taking language and literature classes, and he would often join in on drums. (The Lewis Institute no longer exists, having merged in 1940 with the Armour Institute of Technology to form IIT....

A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. 104.3 Jams Imagine my surprise when I went shuffling through the radio dial and arrived at what I thought was soft-rock station K-Hits, only to hear Mark Morrison’s “Return of the Mack.” About a month ago, K-Hits turned into 104.3 Jams, a station completely devoted to all the 90s hip-hop and R&B that soundtracked my middle-school dances—songs from a simpler time, when for some baffling reason Ja Rule’s out-of-key yelling seemed like a necessary addition to nearly every song on the radio....

As one great Tribune journalist after another took the hedge fund’s buyout and walked out the door, I found myself facing a great decision . . . My love for the Sun-Times goes back to the 1960s when I was a kid growing up in Evanston. I read its sports pages before I went to school. Just how wrong was not apparent to me until much later—in the early 1980s—when I started covering politics in Chicago....

The 2016 presidential election might be remembered as the one about beliefs—about the things that people either believe or refuse to believe. Neil Steinberg wrote in his Wednesday Sun-Times column that he could sum up the race for president in one sentence: “Donald Trump is a man who will say anything, supported by people who will believe anything.” People who choose to believe make-believe aren’t particular to Trump. Many are among the finest people on earth....

I’m privileged to have a built-in “stay-at-home bubble” because I rent an apartment from my friends, who live on the first floor of the building with their son (see “Interview with a gamer” for his take on video games). We all have a fondness for the design and aesthetics of board games from the 70s and 80s, and quarantine time has given us a bit of an excuse to do a deep dive into the household collection....

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. Older strips are archived here.

Bye Bye Birdie In the wrong hands, this 1960 homage to/parody of Elvis Presley and that awful “music” all the kids are listening to can seem very dated indeed. It was, after all, written to entertain old farts (my parents among them) who considered 50s rock ’n’ roll a mere fad. Thankfully, director-choreographer Tammy Mader is a clever woman who respects the material enough to find the comedy in the show’s gentle send-up of middle America while also moving us with the glorious, albeit prerock, score....

A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. Yellow Eyes at Subterranean on Sat 8/6 In my preview of this show, I compared the lunging, turbulent fury of Yellow Eyes’ Sick With Bloom to a spectacular spring flood, and they’re even more powerful onstage. The vagaries of live amplification turn most black-­metal percussion into a hissing wash punctuated with rapid-­fire kick drum, but Yellow Eyes’ drummer pushes himself so viciously, painfully hard that you can hear every crack of the snare even in his most frenzied blastbeats....

Musicians are a scrappy lot. No matter what challenges life throws at them, they do whatever they can to pursue their art and bring the party (or whatever it is they’re starting) to the masses. What happens when those challenges include an uncertain amount of time without concerts or even gatherings of any kind? How do you stay fulfilled when your work depends so heavily on having an audience? Everyone did whatever they could to stay afloat last year, and the Internet provided a lifeboat for many local entertainers....

Q: Here goes: I’m a 32-year-old gay male and I have trouble staying out of my head during sex. I feel like there may be many issues. The one nonissue is everything works fine on my own. When I’m single or “available,” I am OK. Let’s be honest: I’m a slut and I enjoy it. But when I invest in someone, when I’m trying to have an actual relationship, the sex suffers....

Self-described as a “bi bilingual political dance sax punk party,” Providence’s Downtown Boys stamp that mouthful to vinyl by creating a frenzied, intense clatter that sounds as if it’s reverberating off the crumbling brick—and cutting through the musty stench—of every basement, corridor, and back alley in the underground. Their newest record, Full Communism, dropped earlier this month via Don Giovanni Records, and today’s 12 O’Clock Track, “Monstro,” boils over right from the start as smooth sax—which works so well in context it’s kind of amazing—climbs behind vocalist Victoria Ruiz while she demands “Today, today we must scream at the top of our lungs....

Toward the end of Amour Fou, Austrian writer-director Jessica Hausner (Lourdes) imagines the final meeting between Heinrich von Kleist (Christian Friedel)—the gifted but tormented Prussian writer who achieved lasting literary fame only after committing suicide in 1811, at age 34—and his cousin Marie (Sandra Hüller), whom he’d asked on several occasions to join him in death. Marie is clearly fond of her cousin, even enamored with his genius, but she’s unwilling to take his death wish seriously....

Near the end of her new memoir, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget, Sarah Hepola, newly sober, tries to imagine what the rest of her life will look like. She realizes that all her most satisfying daydreams depend upon her being someone else. So do her friendships, her romantic life, and even her career—she’s a writer and the personal essays editor of Salon, where, even in that catalog of human misery, her contributions stand out for their candor and lack of self-pity....

Like most of us, Emily Witt grew up with a set of expectations about how her life would proceed. It was pretty much the same sort of life her parents, most of her friends, and most of the characters on TV and in the movies had: after a period of experimentation, she envisioned, as she puts it, “my sexual experience eventually reaching a terminus, like a monorail gliding to a stop at Epcot Center....

ARTIST: Ryan Duggan SHOW: Jimmy Whispers, Twin Hits, and Love of Everything at East Room on Wed 8/24 MORE INFO: ryanduggan.com

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Wednesday, February 24, 2016. The long, strange story of redeveloping the Old Post Office The abandoned Old Post Office has loomed over the Loop since it closed in 1996. Developers have proposed plans for the prime real estate for years, but nothing has ever come to fruition. Now that Mayor Rahm Emanuel has said he wants to seize the property via eminent domain, Curbed Chicago takes a look back at the many failed ideas floated for the building, from Walgreens headquarters to a casino....

The opening credits sequence of Brian Taylor’s Mom and Dad (which begins a weeklong run at Facets tonight) is meant to resemble something out of a 1970s exploitation movie, with split-screen effects, colored filters, and a Dusty Springfield ballad on the soundtrack. This homage is appropriate, as the film feels like an update of a couple superior exploitation movies of that decade, George A. Romero’s The Crazies (1973) and Russ Meyer’s Supervixens (1975)....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Monday, February 8, 2016. Ex-Chicago police chief McCarthy could hop across the pond to London After being dumped by Mayor Rahm Emanuel just days after the Laquan McDonald shooting video was released, Garry McCarthy is reportedly under consideration to lead London’s Metropolitan Police. “I’d fix London’s police the way I sorted Chicago’s,” he told the Sun newspaper. [Sun]

Las Vegas rapper-producer Hykeem Carter, aka Baby Keem, got his foot in the music industry’s door thanks to hip-hop powerhouse Top Dawg Entertainment, where he’s pitched in on writing and producing three of the label’s big recent releases: Kendrick Lamar’s Black Panther soundtrack, Jay Rock’s Redemption, and Schoolboy Q’s Crash Talk. Now living in Los Angeles, the 18-year-old is still malleable as a musician, and it shows on his latest self-released full-length, the stylistically scatterbrained Die for My Bitch....