Founded in 2013, blog and Web network Doomed & Stoned has blossomed into a worldwide endeavor with a podcast, a quarterly Bandcamp compilation, and an emphasis on using local reporting to help build up individual scenes. Its laser-sharp focus has helped: the Doomed & Stoned musical aesthetic follows the post-Sabbath school of doom, drone, heavy psych, and stoner metal. Even within those strict parameters this three-day blast—which features more than 20 bands, a DJ, and a Sunday brunch—showcases sonic diversity in the genre while highlighting some of Chicago’s strongest practitioners of meditative gut churns and heavy riffs....

Two Weeks in the Midday Sun: A Cannes Notebook is not, as I’d initially hoped, Roger Ebert‘s report of last year’s Cannes film festival, transmitted from the Great Beyond via Ouija board and painstakingly transcribed by University of Chicago Press interns. The truth is much less exciting: it’s a reprint of a 1987 book ostensibly based on Ebert’s journal from that year’s festival, illustrated with his own amateur drawings. It begins at Heathrow with Ebert en route to France, determined to turn two weeks of jet lag, screenings, and interview chasing into some sort of coherent narrative....

Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago. By day, Julius Adorsu Jr. is a supervisor at a major retailer’s tire center. He spends his offhours elevating secondhand shopping to a science. On his personal style blog, Thrift Like a Gentleman, he offers advice on “dressing well without breaking the bank.” “Biggest tip, I’d say, is be patient, persistent, and consistent,” he says....

This week we’ve got another fantasy poster for a real gig! Writer and graphic designer Brian Shamie, who works for the Daily Herald and runs the site Chicago Sound Check, created this poster a year or so after the 2015 Troubled Hubble concert it depicts—the band’s first reunion date since breaking up in 2005. “I wasn’t able to make this Troubled Hubble show,” Shamie tells me via e-mail, “but about a year later, that line in the song [‘14,000 Things to Be Happy About’] was haunting me and I needed to get the vision out of my head....

Beginning with his third feature, Aferim! (2015), Romanian writer-director Radu Jude has seemed to reinvent himself with every new movie. Aferim! was a 19th-century picaresque filled with landscapes and shot in black-and-white widescreen; its follow-up, Scarred Hearts (2016), was a 20th-century chamber drama shot in the squarish Academy ratio (in which virtually all films were shot until the mid-50s) and notable for its devastating static long takes. Jude moved further into stasis with his next feature, the documentary The Dead Nation (2017), which considered Romania’s Jewish Holocaust (1941-1945) through a montage of still photographs from the 1930s and ’40s....

As part of his latest attempt to drive CPS to bankruptcy, Governor Rauner has attempted to transform himself into Tom Tresser. In particular, Rauner directed Tony Smith and James Meeks—appointees who run the state board of education—to order Chicago Public Schools to turn over specific information regarding its budget, payroll, and bond obligations. In particular, I suspect Rauner wants to use whatever dirt he unearths as an excuse to cut state aid to CPS....

Q: I’m someone who does gay porn for a living. How do people who do gay porn meet someone who doesn’t just sexualize or fetishize them? I can’t eat, sleep, and breathe my work constantly, but the guys I meet want me to live out the “porn persona” version of myself all the time. How does someone who does porn know who you can be yourself with? —Aiden Ward (@aidenxxxward)...

Truthfully, this project has little to do with basketball. What I am trying to do is explore why as a city, we neglect half of it,” Chicago-based photographer Adam Jason Cohen says. “Why are there no resources for the youth? Where is the funding? The infrastructure? There is a growing wealth gap, especially in the advent of gentrification in some of these neighborhoods, that is creating much more problems than [what’s] being spoken about....

Chicago-raised, Atlanta-based rapper Lil Wop loves Gucci Mane so much he replicated the trap king’s iconic ice-cream-cone face tattoo on his right cheek. As Lil Wop told the Fader, Gucci Mane “taught me you can’t sound like nobody . . . To have the sauce, you gotta have all the ingredients. It ain’t all about wordplay.” Gucci clearly thinks his acolyte gets it, because last year he signed the emerging rapper to his Interscope imprint, 1017 Eskimos, and collaborated with him on a tune called “Paid in Full....

Guerilla Toss are down with the Grateful Dead. In an impassioned Facebook post from July 2015, the New York-based band threw laurels upon a group they called “the first ‘DIY’ band,” noting that the Dead used harsh noise in the 1960s and brandished modular synthesizers throughout the ’70s. Like the Dead, Guerilla Toss combine a spirit of experimentation with a rugged DIY ethos and a penchant for lobbing undeniable hooks into unsuspecting ears....

Chicago rapper 엔도 Endo began releasing his dance-indebted tracks in 2018, and he’s since gravitated toward a loose collective of experimental pop, hip-hop, and dance musicians supported by production company Reset Presents. It booked Endo for his first live set in February 2019, on a show that also featured rising locals such as R&B artist Hxry and rapper Mohawk Johnson. (In March of that year, Johnson appeared on the volcanic Endo single “Burn It Up....

Four years ago, Save Money rapper Sterling Hayes dropped his debut mixtape, Antidepressant, which foreshadowed the wave of Soundcloud rappers who’ve peppered their rhymes with intimate disclosures of their struggles with mental health issues. But that’s not to say that Hayes has much in common with those MCs, or with any scene around town either. On his forthcoming album, Flirting With Death (Create Music Group), he unloads diaristic raps that sometimes thrash against the beat or refuse to conform to a discernible rhyme scheme—he bends every line to the vagaries of his emotions, which makes for some engrossing passages....

Who said that October was the only month of the year for watching scary movies? Cinepocalypse, now in its third year at the Music Box Theatre, proves that Chicago’s biggest horror fans want blood, guts, and terror in June too. “The beauty of the space at the Music Box Theatre is that it’s kind of like a cinematic church,” says Goldbloom. “It’s such a fun playground for a programmer to come into and design a festival....

Cleveland’s Heart Attack Man have a good grip on what makes emo powerful, but they also know what can make it awful. On their second album, this month’s Fake Blood (Triple Crown/You Did This), they mock the worst of the 2000s emo community—a subset of musicians who dabbled in pushing an incel agenda—with the tongue-in-cheek anthem “Out for Blood.” On that track, Heart Attack Man use the hot-blooded pop-punk hooks of emo’s commercial peak to soundtrack the self-righteous narrator’s misplaced indignation—showing that they can be as sly as their melodies are big (which is to say, “very”)....

A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. Sanyo MCD-Z1 Boombox CD Stereo Cassette & Recorder I still have my first boombox, which I bought alongside my first two CDs, Annie Lennox’s Diva and Nirvana’s In Utero, in junior high in 1993. (My musical proclivities were undoubtedly rooted in the Little Bird in the womb.) The boombox, along with my collection of mixtapes, has survived nearly three decades of moves across the country and among countless apartments....

Courtesy AMC “I am Hamm.” Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. • The list of non-Equity Jeff Award nominees for 2015? —Tony Adler

If and when the Cubs are eliminated from world championship contention this autumn by an inferior team, their heartsick fans need to keep something in mind: the defeat will have nothing to do with karma, or a curse, or the gods amusing themselves at Chicago’s expense. Today’s pennant winners might not have been best over the duration, and they might not even have been best when the season came to a close....

Comedian Cameron Esposito has never shied away from talking about her personal life onstage. In her reflective new memoir Save Yourself (Grand Central Publishing) she dives even deeper, looking back on her childhood in suburban Western Springs and the personal self-discovery that came with recognizing her own sexuality, coming out to her parents, and finding a home in the comedy world. The live stand-up performances at the Den that were set to coincide with the release of the book on March 24 have been cancelled, but lockdown is a good time to indulge in a read that’s both heart-breaking and heart-warming, with a heavy dose of laugh out loud humor....

It’s time to induct Bruce Springsteen into the Queer Icon Hall of Fame. The show lands on its feet thanks to its stars. Ruhl, Gorman, and Mencotti deliver fleshed-out performances that nail the loving yet acidic chemistry of friends who’ve spent too much time together and know too much about each other’s histories. While I think that Natalie’s character and her emerging sexual identity could be a welcome entry into the narrative for younger audience members, I found myself far more invested in the lives of the three older friends....