Michael Gebert Shumai at Fat Rice, harbinger of our future I was talking to John Manion, chef-owner of La Sirena Clandestina, for this post about the restaurant’s empanadas, and we were discussing what the next hot trend in dining would be, after such past hits as ramen (which still continues to produce new entries, like Shin Thompson’s Furious Spoon, opening on Wednesday), doughnuts, and pork belly. And he said simply, “Everybody’s working on their Mission Chinese....

Darren McCollester/Getty Images for Boston Children’s Hospital His latest material isn’t so much of a party. Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, amuse, or inspire us. • About the construction of a giant new canal in Nicaragua? —Ben Sachs

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images SCOTUS done did it Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. • That slavery never really ended, it just evolved? —Steve Bogira

Few jazz musicians combine love of tradition with mordant wit like drummer and bandleader Matt Wilson. That combination is perfectly suited to his Christmas Tree-O project, which sanguinely essays holiday themes—both classic and schmaltzy—with gusto and ardor. But as the group established on its entertaining eponymous 2010 album, it isn’t above tweaking the material too. It takes a certain amount of chutzpah to even consider playing “The Chipmunk Song”—whose very title sends shivers of pitch-shifted whining down my spine—but by treating it with a lurching rhythmic attack and an even more wild, rheumy bass clarinet voice (courtesy of the versatile Jeff Lederer), the trio imparts an acidic bite that showcases the tune on a strictly musical level....

Relay Recordings, run by Chicago percussionist and composer Tim Daisy, is on a roll. In September, it released Roman Poems, an album of itchy, inverted postbop from Daisy’s group Vox 4 (cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm, clarinetist James Falzone, and violinist and pianist Macie Stewart). Last month, it dropped the trio record Elevation (made at ESS in 2017 with electronic musician Rafael Toral and saxophonist Mars Williams), whose chattering, textural free jazz brings to mind a forest of animals slowly coming to life....

By the time Nicky Mendelsohn steps into his follow spot as Stephen, a socially inept teenage vegan, the drama kids of Lovely Valley Performing Arts Magnet High School are already in trouble. Having moved rehearsal to a wilderness area for their upcoming production of a musical based on Lord of the Flies, they’re already settling into the delirious state of nature William Golding wrote his book to interrogate. Hungry and rowdy, a detachment leaves Stephen behind to forage alone while they hunt for meat....

Please don’t take this the wrong way, but while we’re really flattered to be invited to your storytelling show, right now the greatest single obstacle keeping us from attending is actually getting to your storytelling show. You can certainly follow this logic, because though the incentives to plot our week around attending “Really Specific Grandma Narratives: An Incubator Night of Intermediate Storytellers” are both legion and legitimate, and though our otherwise dogged fight to restore net neutrality deserves a well-earned night off, if we’re going to make it to the Story Consortium Lab North Side Chapter in time to catch the first up-and-comer at the top of the bill, we’re going to have to ride the Chicago Transit Authority....

If you spent any time at Chicago indie shows last year, chances are you became familiar with the band Beach Bunny, even if you never actually saw them. The group’s name appeared on so many of the gig posters and concert calendars plastered on the walls of local clubs that you could easily imagine they had weekly residencies at half of them. On top of that, they played a set at Riot Fest, and they were selected as one of the openers for a string of Alkaline Trio hometown shows at the Metro during first week of January....

Some of my most treasured personal objects are punk and new wave 45s I bought at the old Wax Trax! Records in the early 80s, so reviewing Industrial Accident—The Story of Wax Trax! Records, which screens Wednesday in two sold-out shows at the 25th Chicago Underground Film Festival, may tax my powers of objectivity. Located next to the Biograph Theater in Lincoln Park, Wax Trax! was one of the first places I went in the city when I could venture in from the suburbs on my own, and along with a few other things I encountered (the elevated system, the art house cinemas, this newspaper), it suggested that adult life might have more to offer than Reaganomics and the Moral Majority....

Would you trust the culinary judgment of a restaurateur who has gone on record admitting he won’t perform oral sex on his partner? What about one who thinks it’s a good idea to batter and deep-fry lobster, a shellfish as delicate and unforgiving as an orchid? With its deep-fried-dominant menu, the Licking, which is described as “Miami-style” soul food, tilts in that direction, though pretty much anything you can order fried you can also order grilled—just not the conch, which they were out of anyway on the afternoon I visited with Reader interns Aaron Allen and Andrea Michelson....

Italian drummer and composer Tommaso Moretti settled here in 2013 after playing with Chicagoans such as Ernest Dawkins in his homeland, but he didn’t come across my radar until last year, when he appeared on the eponymous debut album of Bottle Tree—a smart, progressive R&B trio with multi-instrumentalist Ben Lamar Gay and singer A.M. Frison. He shows a different but equally satisfying side of his musicianship with his new album SemoComeSemo (Amalgam Music), a dynamic jazz-quartet recording of original compositions that deftly infuse sleek postbop with Italian folk traditions....

Though it opened in 1973, four years before the iconic New York club, Dugan’s Bistro in River North became known as the Studio 54 of the midwest, attracting appearances from Bette Midler, Diana Ross, John Waters, Andy Warhol, among many others, and often as a surprise to the bar’s patrons. But the one star they were almost guaranteed to see was Bob Theiss, better known as the Bearded Lady. While he was writing about Renslow’s bar, many people asked Keehnen what day-to-day life must have been like for these 1970s club kids....

L ast Thursday, the Chicago Reader‘s then-executive editor, Mark Konkol, published a cover that depicted gubernatorial candidate J.B Pritzker sitting on a black lawn jockey. He published it without the knowledge of Edwin Eisendrath, CEO of Sun-Times Media, which owns the Reader. The image was meant to call out the sneak racism of white progressives who call themselves friends to the African-American community, but many in that same community interpreted it as a reduction of black Democrats to a racist trope....

Alejandro González Iñárritu is the nominal director of The Revenant, a historical drama set in the American wilderness of the early 19th century, but the movie doesn’t resemble any of his previous work. Prior to his Oscar-winning Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), his films—Amores Perros (2000), 21 Grams (2003), Babel (2006), Biutiful (2010)—were unbearably dour and self-important, with gimmicky overlapping plots, filmmaking techniques cribbed from Steven Soderbergh, and a message that boiled down to “it’s a small world after all....

In far-west-suburban Westmont, tucked inconspicuously among the boxy office parks and asphalt vistas, sits the International Plaza Shopping Center, a large, frequently desolate Asian supermarket anchoring a somewhat dingy food court, perpetually underlit in spite of a broad skylight. Unlike the grocery, the food court seems to do a brisk business, with folks continually lined up at the China Cafe for hot soy milk and Chinese doughnuts, and on weekends at the neighboring Yu Ton Dumpling House, where the owners stack piles of glistening red-green amaranth, Chinese broccoli, and cabbages harvested from their own farm....

On Tuesday, December 19, Schubas hosts a release party for Take It Outside, the debut book by 24-year-old Chicago music-scene photographer Tim Nagle. Headlining the show is Phoelix, the talented multi-instrumentalist and singer who coproduced Noname’s Telefone and Saba’s Bucket List Project. Rookie opens, and throughout the night members of young rock bands (including Twin Peaks and the Orwells) spin records. The bill reflects the kinds of music Nagle follows: he spent most of his youth on Chicago’s south side, devouring rap and rock, and he was a teenager when the Smith Westerns broke out....

If you went to a lot of shows at defunct Bridgeport punk house Rancho Huevos, you likely caught the July 2019 debut performance of south-side underground supergroup Canal Irreal. The band, whose name means “unreal channel” in Spanish, features members of razacore outfit Sin Orden (who emerged in a second wave of local Latinx punk bands in the late 1990s), guitarist Scott Plant of oddball postpunk unit Droids Blood, and longtime DIY punk linchpin Martin Sorrondeguy, best known as the fearless front man of radical Spanish-language hardcore champions Los Crudos and queercore evangelists Limp Wrist....

With his open friendliness and his mane of curly hair—which earned him the nickname “Medusa”—Dave Shelton was a magnetic presence on Chicago’s nightlife scene in the mid-1970s. DJ Teri Bristol recalls first spotting him at a Lakeview gay club called Broadway Limited. “His hair was past his shoulders—it was in ringlet curls,” she says. “He stuck out to me. It was almost like he was illuminated. I was instantly drawn to him....

Music festivals as we’ve known them may be in jeopardy due to a virus, but festival culture keeps on giving: this summer’s bounty includes Deafbrick, the new album by brain-rattling São Paulo psych-punk trio Deafkids and maniacal London-based electro-noise-rock duo Petbrick, aka musician and producer Wayne Adams and Sepultura and Cavalera Conspiracy drummer Iggor Cavalera. The record grew out of the bands’ friendship, which led to a collaborative performance at the 2019 Roadburn Festival in Tilburg, Netherlands....

Q: I’m 20, straight, male, fit, and active. I masturbated prone—flat on my stomach—for years. I’ve now changed to a more traditional position (on my back or sitting upright), and I’m using my hand rather than grinding against a mattress. I can easily orgasm when I masturbate. I’ve had sex four times in my life, and I’m worried because I wasn’t able to orgasm by someone else’s hand, through oral, or during penetration....