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Formed in La Quinta, California (“the Gem of the Desert”), in 1986, Yawning Man are largely considered the fathers of the desert-rock movement. The band’s now legendary “generator parties”—all-night drug-fueled jams held in the middle of nowhere and named for the equipment they’d use to power the shows—are still spoken about as life-changing moments by members of groups that emerged out of the same scene, including Kyuss and Queens of the Stone Age....

This coming week the Gene Siskel Film Center will screen the new restoration of Je T’Aime, Moi Non Plus (1976), the first film written and directed by controversial French musician Serge Gainsbourg. I can’t recommend the film wholeheartedly, in spite of some memorably stark mise-en-scene and committed performances from Joe Dallesandro and Gainsbourg’s then-partner Jane Birkin, though I’m sure Gainsbourg fans will appreciate it. The movie represents a cinematic analogue to the sort of sexual provocations Gainsbourg recorded throughout his musical career—it’s designed to make viewers uncomfortable, even when (maybe especially when) it’s operating in a comic register....

German one-man primal black-metal outfit Old Growth has dropped a remarkable debut. The project of a musician who goes by Shaman Animist, Mossweaver is dedicated to the theme of reverence for wilderness, and contains more than an hour of evocative hymns to the unknowable forest that was here before us and will be here long after we go extinct—unless we destroy it first. His tools are high-tech, but at peak fury his sound is primitive and feral....

In COVID times, gestures that would have been banal and forgettable a year ago now arrive embedded with loaded backstories—even those (especially those?) that play out on stage. Eventually, the group stepped off Zoom and met for tech week in TATL’s Rogers Park space. It was the first time the maximum-45-seat Jarvis Square Theater had been used for live theater in almost a year. With Taylor taking on chauffeur duties so the actors could avoid public transit, the group did two days of masked rehearsals....

We held a telethon from 7 AM to 7 PM on Friday, August 23, 2019. You can rewatch here. Help keep the Chicago Reader independent and thriving. Become a member or make a donation: chicagoreader.com/members Part one Part two, The Ben Joravsky Show special telethon edition Part three

Michael Gebert Jake Bickelhaupt (left) in his apartment kitchen for a Sous Rising dinner. I don’t take any national list too seriously, but if there’s one I tend to give some credence to, it’s Food & Wine‘s best new chefs list, which is genuinely national (not six New York chefs and four from the rest of America) and intelligently reflective of who’s won respect from diners, reviewers, and peers in a relatively short time....

Lillstreet Art Center is a Chicago institution situated in a 40,000-square-foot gear factory in Ravenswood. The building is a considerable step up from its former home in a renovated horse barn. The goal of Lillstreet is to make art as accessible as possible to as many people as possible. First-time classes are always available, and new classes are based on student and teacher suggestions. New offerings include a class on pottery as a political object, and visiting artist workshops for feltmaking....

The world is littered with adaptations of the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice, but the Greek myth is just a seed for the creator-directors of Rooming House, Julia Rhoads of Lucky Plush Productions and Leslie Buxbaum Danzig, a cofounder of 500 Clown. Over its brisk 75 minutes their light-footed, sometimes cheeky production grows into something expansive and challenging, exploring deeper aspects of storytelling and human behavior through Lucky Plush’s signature blend of insight and play....

A nascent political action committee, Illinoisans for Independent Work, is being bankrolled by rideshare giant Lyft, with one of the Bay Area-based company’s top executives at the helm— signaling a potential expansion of efforts to carve out independent contractor status for their drivers following a win at the ballot box in California. More precisely, the committee’s listed address is the office of California-based boutique law firm Politicom Law LLP, which specializes in political compliance law and was cofounded by the committee’s treasurer Darrin Lim....

The 22nd Chicago Underground Film Festival reflects a positively global mind-set, with selections from or about Argentina, Burma, Cyprus, and other far-flung countries. In fact “the underground” seems to get bigger all the time: Ben Russell, Ben Rivers, and collaborators Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn, all CUFF veterans whose work is included in this year’s edition, have recently gotten exposure at prominent European festivals. That’s not to say that CUFF has abandoned its local or transgressive roots; this year brings not only a program of amateur porn from the 90s, but also the world premiere of Night of the Blood Squatch, a locally produced short about a meeting between a “furry” and a Bigfoot conspiracy theorist....

The chief innovation Atlanta trio Migos have brought to rap music is using words as punctuation. (Period). Quavo, his cousin Offset, and his nephew Takeoff don’t merely rap or sing or rap-sing, they pepper their bars with stray words or onomatopoetic sounds that aren’t just stylistic quirks or sound effects (boom), but integral components of their vocals. (Critical). Sometimes the device works like the connective tissue of em dashes (continue), ellipses (dot dot dot), or rhetorical questions (what)....

Redlining is still alive and well, continuing to haunt communities that decades ago were denied access to home loan financing. A March report from the Neighborhood Community Reinvestment Coalition found that areas denied credit in the postwar period remain heavily disinvested in today. The Gartz family lived in the neighborhood in the midst of these chaotic changes, similarly confused about what was happening. But unlike most white families, who sold their homes and fled the neighborhood, Linda’s parents remained, rooted by the reluctance of her father, Fred, to leave the place where he grew up and Fred’s parents’ decision to give the family their house—a six-flat—after they fled, compelling them to become landlords for more than 40 years....

One of the sad side effects of getting older is that you see so many of your longtime friends and allies pass away. He helped create the Jacob H. Carruthers Center for Inner City Studies at Northeastern Illinois University. “He backed economic empowerment, the dismantling of educational inequities, and reparations for slavery,” as Maureen O’Donnell put it in her Sun-Times obituary. “He saw the people of the African diaspora as a pan-African source of power and pride....

O n Friday, March 31, 1922, at a remote farm outside the Bavarian town of Kaifeck, someone slaughtered six people-the Gruber family and their maid-striking each one repeatedly on the head and face with a pickax. Four days later neighbors found the bodies. They also discovered that the farm and livestock had been well tended all weekend; the killer had apparently moved in for a while before vanishing. Still, West has assembled potent incidents into an explosive mix, as is her wont....

We should have known about John Mahoney. He left plenty of clues. His castmates may have had an inkling during the production, but there had been no ballyhoo, no milking it, nothing to disrupt or distract from the work. Onstage, at least, Mahoney made it seem so.

The Polka King, which is now available to stream on Netflix, easily could have been a condescending film; based on a 2009 documentary called The Man Who Would Be Polka King, it tells the story of Jan Lewan, a Polish-born, Pennsylvania-based polka singer and entrepreneur who, in the 1990s, embroiled his fans in a Ponzi scheme and raised nearly $5 million. Lewan’s music is tacky and the outfits he performs in even tackier; that he used the stolen money to fuel his career seems more pathetic than devious....

This sultry ‘fall’ weather means one thing and one thing only: you’re clinically proven to be better looking after a meal at Katana.” From a design standpoint the place is interesting. Within its 13,000 square feet squats a massive square bar and lounge where you can make eyes at everyone in the dining room, which sits beneath a huge atrium of blond wooden beams that gives you the sense that you’re a dumpling sweating in a giant bamboo steamer....

Like many people trying to make it through quarantine, I tried out a lot of different hobbies over the past year. I made a few loaves of bread, started seriously taking care of a plant, and I tried to perfect that TikTok whipped instant coffee more times than I’d like to admit. But the only one that outlasted its novelty was writing letters. In July, after watching Doug Nichol’s documentary California Typewriter, I picked up an electric typewriter I found for free on NextDoor, bought some stamps, and asked for people’s addresses in an attempt to find connection in this time of isolation....

ARTIST: Noelia Towers and Josh Zoerner SHOW: Venus Doom: A Dark Valentine’s Party co-organized by Someoddpilot and featuring a performance by Girlboifriend and DJ sets by Fee Lion, which closes the exhibit “You Will Die” at Public Works Gallery on Fri 2/14 MORE INFO: Josh Zoerner and Noelia Towers