“Chicago always feels a little bit magic to me,” says Dana Schechter. “The associations I have with it are filtered through the memory of a child. It’s nice.” Oranssi Pazuzu, Insect Ark, Varaha Thu 10/10, 7 PM, Reggies’ Rock Club, 2105 S. State, $20, 17+ Schechter says Touch and Go bands are still on her regular playlists, and you can hear their influence here and there in her work. Marrow Hymns tracks “In the Nest” and “Skin Walker,” with their grunged-out fuzz of detuned feedback, could almost be Jesus Lizard outtakes with the vocals stripped out and all the upper-register frequencies dialed back....

Oso Oso front man Jade Lilitri makes sweetly catchy, straightforward rock songs like he was born to do it. Though he’s a veteran of the east-coast independent emo scene, he couldn’t find a label for Oso Oso’s second album, 2017’s The Yunahon Mixtape, so he put it out himself as a pay-what-you-want release on Bandcamp. The album gained a cult following, and pop-punk-focused indie label Triple Crown reissued it the following year....

At first glance, Pat Whalen is exactly what you’d expect from a late-night talk show host. The 29-year-old is a white man with thick-rimmed glasses who puts on a black suit and skinny tie for his monthly comedic talk show, Good Evening With Pat Whalen. The self-described “late-night talk-show news-alternative” is like the love child of Conan and The Daily Show: the bits are quick and silly, the coverage has a political bent, and there’s almost always a musical guest....

For those who have wished for a Chicago-set film about queer sex workers, kink, religion, and talking to the dead—haven’t we all?—your prayers have finally been answered with Holy Trinity. The debut feature from performance artist Molly Hewitt (who also goes by the moniker Glamhag) is dripping with style and poignant commentary on the intersection of power and pleasure. Holy Trinity makes a point to note that, while they may look similar on paper, not all kinds of subordination are created equal....

Correction: This item has been updated to include details about Renaldo Domino’s new Colemine Records single “No Laggin’ and Draggin’,” whose upcoming release the show celebrates. In a just and perfect world, Renaldo Domino would be as widely revered as legendary Chicago soul greats Curtis Mayfield, Jerry Butler, and Gene Chandler. In my opinion, the only reason the south-side native isn’t a household name is that he simply didn’t get as many chances to record as some of his peers....

Earlier this year Strut Records released Ghetto Madness, a collection of material from recently revived Chicago electronic label Dance Mania. Ghetto Madness is Strut’s second compilation of tracks from the label that birthed ghetto house; it follows last year’s Hardcore Traxx, a 24-track release spanning the years 1986 to 1997. The 15 songs on Ghetto Madness are drawn from Dance Mania’s 90s catalog, and the tunes are made by many of the producers whose raunchy and raw dance cuts transformed ghetto house into an underground phenomenon....

Hannah Ii-Epstein hunches over when she talks, her voice soft and vaguely otherworldly, but her eyes are sharp and deep, and she looks you straight in the eye as she speaks, picking her words with a care that makes it clear she packs meaning in every syllable she emits. Her plays are the same way. Their stories unfold with a misleading informality, accentuated by the fact that most of Ii-Epstein’s characters speak Hawaiian pidgin English, the creolized mix of English, Hawaiian, Cantonese, Japanese, and other Asian and Pacific Island languages that is spoken by everyday Hawaiians....

Chicago Movie Journal is a new biweekly column about movies and movie-related things around the city. The Runaway, about the misadventures of an eight-year-old delinquent who flees his rural home to fend for himself in Kolkata, conveys a Marxist sympathy for the lower classes in depiction of some of the minor characters and slum life in general. In Interview, the most formally inventive film I’ve seen in some time, Sen plays with cinematic technique throughout; characters break the fourth wall, documentary realism gives way to expressionistic sequences, and real-world current events intrude on the narrative....

Nothing says summer in Chicago like a refreshing dip in one of the Park District’s 49 outdoor pools. Sure, they vary in quality—from inviting oases lined with lounge chairs and shaded by leafy trees to stark blue rectangles in slabs of concrete—but for many Chicagoans and their families, these neighborhood pools are a lifesaver on sweltering days. That is, if they can actually get in the water without drowning in rules and regulations....

Brian D. Kersey/Getty Images RIP Lennie Merullo Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. • That our best hope against another domestic spying program isn’t Obama, it’s Rand Paul? (And he might be sacrificing his presidential run to stop it.) —Ryan Smith • About Lata 65, a group of senior citizen street artists in Portugal? —Brianna Wellen

Some people dance to the beat of a different drum, but choreographer and director Faye Driscoll beats the drum of a different dance. At first, her performances seem spasmodic or juvenile; the cast behave like kids in a kindergarten class after they’ve chased Pop Rocks with Pepsi. But Driscoll often addresses adult subject matter—most prominently, sex—and her pieces are so obviously structured that it’s impossible to accuse them of being thrown together....

Money isn’t everything. As an antidote to the mega-budget spectacles Ready Player One and Pacific Rim: Uprising, and with a nod to Chicago Film Society’s April 10 screening of Edgar G. Ulmer’s dirt-cheap The Man from Planet X, we suggest five more low-budget, low-low-budget, and almost-no-budget science-fiction classics (yes, with more Ulmer). Tetsuo: The Iron Man An exceptionally kinky and violent Japanese experimental feature by Shinya Tsukamoto (1989) that’s a prime candidate for midnight cult status....

“What came first? The music or the misery?” The question was first posed in Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity in 1995, then was asked again in the film version in 2000, again in a Broadway musical in 2006, and here, in the year of our lord 2020, it seems we’re still trying to figure it out. The new High Fidelity series on Hulu doesn’t come right out and say it, but it does highlight that no matter who you are or where (or when) you live, getting over heartbreak is a universal experience—and sometimes using music is the best way to do it....

Q: I’ve been living with my boyfriend for a year. We met on FetLife and I was honest about being in an open relationship (at the time) and seeking a sexual connection over a relationship. But one nut after another and pretty soon we were professing our love for each other and he shared that he wanted to be the father of my children. However, right before he moved in I found out he was still texting other women despite asking me not to text, sext, or have sex with any other men....

Last summer the food world was freaking out over “artisanal toast,” pricey butter-and-jam-smeared slices from high-grade whole-grain loaves, like something your weather-beaten ancestors might have kneaded out of einkorn, oats, and prairie dust. Many laughed at the presumption of this latest outrage of food-hipster pretension, but nobody’s laughing at Bunny, Elizabeth chef Iliana Regan‘s latest effort, a bakery in a Lakeview shoebox of such modest dimensions she dubs it “the Micro Bakery....

Fire-Abla Brooks homes from Robert R Gigliotti on Vimeo. A drone caught dramatic video of a fire in the ABLA/Brooks Homes in University Village Wednesday. The footage shows playground equipment enveloped in flames in a courtyard in the middle of the public housing project, which is located off Loomis between 13th and 14th Streets. Thick smoke billowed into the air. Firefighters could be seen at the scene hosing down the fire as it destroyed the equipment....

Producer Quinn Cochran and singer Quinn Barlow, who make evanescent indie-pop songs as Iris Temple, met at Lincoln College Preparatory Academy in Kansas City, Missouri. They became friends in band class—Cochran played guitar, Barlow trombone—and after graduating in 2014, they came to Chicago for college. Barlow almost immediately returned to Kansas City, but in 2015 they began collaborating long-distance, with Barlow rapping over beats Cochran sent him. By August of that year, Iris Temple had grown legs, and Barlow moved back to Chicago....

Michael Gebert Whitney Morrow, mixologist at Drumbar “There’s lots of green on the menu,” says Whitney Morrow, a tall blonde who is dressed in the vaguely 19th century garb that’s become de rigueur for mixologists (a term which also dates back to the 19th century, though like the look, it spent a lot of time out of fashion before roaring back to prominence). The first two drinks we tried demonstrated that more isn’t always more....

The setup to Bill Cain’s revisionist Shakespearean fairy tale is the sort of juicy, rebellious, intrigue-filled “what if” fantasy that would make Quentin Tarantino proud: What if a villainous Lord Robert Cecil (Michael Dalberg) approached the Bard (Brendan Hutt) and his company to create a propaganda play that whitewashes the recently foiled Gunpowder Plot to bomb Parliament? And what if the King’s Men deviated from their forcibly “requested” commission to instead expose a conspiracy led by a corrupt king?...

Chicago has no shortage of young talented singers who can elevate a great rap track but who focus in their own careers on sounds outside or tangental to hip-hop. The recent EP from Eryn Allen Kane, this month’s Aviary: Act II, is steeped in soul, but the 26-year-old Detroit native has made a name for herself in part by working in Chicago’s hip-hop scene. I first heard her on Saba‘s excellent 2014 mixtape Comfort Zone, where she appears on two tracks, “Burnout” and “For Y’all,” which also features the incomparable MC Tree....