Despite the misfortunes of the pandemic, arts communities in Chicago found ways to keep calm and carry on. Latinx musicians, like many of their peers, pivoted from canceled gigs or tours into developing virtual projects and producing new music. The Los Sundowns EP by The Los Sundowns Latin Afro-jam funk band ÉSSO decided to repackage their album Xicago as a string of monthly singles, beginning in May. And last September, front man Armando Pérez dropped the cumbia-heavy EP Raza....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Friday, May 13, 2016. Have a good Friday the 13th! Bruce Rauner is less popular than Scott Walker, but more popular than Chris Christie Governor Bruce Rauner is the sixth-least popular governor in the U.S., according to a survey of 66,000 voters taken by Morning Consult. At least he’s not Kansas governor Scott Brownback, who was named the country’s least popular governor. Governor Charlie Baker of Massachusetts was the most popular in the survey....

On Sunday night at Constellation, celebrated New York-based new-music group Mivos Quartet will premiere Chain Reactions/Five Events by composer and electronic musician Sam Pluta, who moved to Chicago a little over a year ago to become an assistant professor of music at the University of Chicago. The concert doubles as a release event for Broken Symmetries (Carrier), Pluta’s second album devoted to his own compositions. You might expect Pluta to promote the show by foregrounding the significance of Chain Reactions, which brings together his practices as a composer, improviser, and performer—or to point out that it appears on Broken Symmetries, alongside three more electroacoustic works (performers on the album include Mivos, Wet Ink Ensemble, violinist Josh Modney, and flutist Anne La Berge)....

Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons Looks pretty, right? Well, it’s fuckin’ loud too. Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. • The Guardian‘s investigation into former Chicago police detective Richard Zuley and his interrogation techniques in Chicago and at Guantanamo Bay? —John Dunlevy • That a new Dr. Seuss book will be released in July? —Brianna Wellen

Does a comic strip belong on a museum wall? I ask this not to question the value of cartooning, but because I wonder whether a wall is the best place to experience what comics are designed to do. This ate at me as I wandered through “Chicago Comics: 1960s to Now,” the generous survey of 60 years of Chicago’s cartoonists currently on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. There’s absolutely no question that much of the work on display deserves to be known and celebrated....

This week’s gig poster advertises one of several livestreamed music festivals scheduled for this weekend. Terrell Davis created this image in support of the Diamond Formation URL online festival: a 13-and-a-half-hour lineup of music, performance, and multimedia that starts this Saturday afternoon at Smart Bar, organized by Chicago artists Ariel Zetina, Dutchesz Gemini (recently relocated to Minneapolis), and Miss Twink USA. The concert will feature 15 DJs, including DJ Stingray from Detroit, Akua from Brooklyn, and They/Them DJ from Los Angeles, along with live performance by Cae Monae, Darling Shear, and others....

My nightstand is a graveyard of books left open and abandoned. It isn’t their fault really. It’s hard to slow down a racing mind, especially one that works in media, reading words all day long. Before quarantine, I would read on the bus or before a meeting, or on my lunch break. My home is my office now and that means I work late into the night—there isn’t a clear line of when to “clock out....

Blood and Black Lace Later this week, Doc Films is showing Kidnapped, aka Rabid Dogs, one of the final films by horror master Mario Bava. The film represents the director’s only foray into the crime genre, and it screens as part of Doc’s “Poliziotteschi: Shoot First, Die Later” series. It’s an interesting film, relatively staid compared to Bava’s other stuff, but it has a visceral edge that plays with audience expectations....

Chicagoan Mike Fox launched Arthhur a few years ago to explore any musical style he pleased. Multi-instrumentalist Matt Ciani, who plays with Fox in doom four-piece Flesh of the Stars, quickly joined the fold, and the two have since steered Arthhur through whimsical indie rock (2018’s come meet the opposite committee), somber ambient (2020’s Let’s Go Piss in the Lake), and more. The best version of Arthhur thus far appeared on the December 2018 album Lost in the Walled City, thanks in part to sharp contributions from the band’s newest member, bassist and percussionist Luke Dahlgren....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Tuesday, October 31, 2017. Happy Halloween! Gun violence is keeping the new chief of Chicago’s FBI field office awake at night Jeffrey Sallet, the new head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Chicago field office, is losing sleep at night over the city’s gun violence problem, and he doesn’t officially start the job until November 6. “I’m doing my homework and making sure that I am engaged on that issue from the moment I hit the ground in Chicago,” he told the Sun-Times....

Update 8/10: Chuck Prophet’s SPACE concert in August has been postponed till March 17, 2022. The FitzGerald’s show in October is still scheduled to proceed. If the best parts of your classic British Invasion, 50s country, 60s pop, and pure rock ’n’ roll records could be transformed into a person, they might look and sound a lot like Chuck Prophet. For almost 30 years, this Bay Area songwriter has reliably delivered albums so pleasingly familiar that, had he started a few decades earlier, it’d be easy to imagine him outshining the likes of Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen....

James Bryce said that Chicago is “perhaps the most typically American place in America.” Filmmaker Steve James updated that: “What Chicago is struggling with, America is struggling with.” I spoke with James, a two-time Academy Award nominee for Hoop Dreams and America to Me, and his partner and producer Zak Piper, just before the world premiere of two of four one-hour episodes of the new documentary City So Real at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City in January produced by Participant Media and Kartemquin Films....

Cleveland native Galcher Lustwerk (who prefers to leave his birth name unknown) raps and produces deep-house instrumentals, but you can’t properly describe his music as some combination of house and hip-hop (and he absolutely does not make “hip-house”). Now based in New York, Lustwerk primarily appears interested in spellbinding grooves, in which he siphons trancelike qualities from laid-back sounds outside of electronic music. On last year’s 200% Galcher (Lustwerk Music) he works mellow jazz sax and modern funk bass into his cool house instrumentals....

Steven Dietz’s family drama lacks high stakes. Nothing is as it seems to be in How a Boy Falls, Steven Dietz’s family drama receiving its world premiere production here at Northlight, and that’s a problem. If one person had a dark secret, or hidden past, in this tale of a family shaken by the perhaps accidental death of a young boy, it might have made for a great drama—or at least an interesting one....

Since fall weather is such a rare and precious commodity, it seems cruel to ask anybody to spend any more time than necessary indoors listening to people talk. But please hear us out on Chicago Ideas Week, which starts up October 16. And anyway, it might rain. The goal of all this, Jones says, is to inspire audiences to think about issues that are affecting their city and their lives and then leave the program with some idea about how to take action....

Wicker Park rapper Judy knows that with the right delivery, his subtle groans can be just as compelling as his lyrics. On “Inside Grey,” from his new Ard Bet (Wing Hoe), his words slide out of his mouth with the battered weariness of a twentysomething who’s lost count of the number of late nights he’s misspent on one bender or another, but he counterbalances the song’s dark themes with an intuitive grasp of melody....

When Larry David appeared on Saturday Night Live to impersonate Bernie Sanders, viewers went crazy. But David’s impression of the Democratic presidential candidate pales in comparison to that of LA-based comedian James Adomian. Granted, he’s had more practice—he rolled out his Sanders impression during his multiple sets at Chicago’s Comedy Exposition last summer before #feelthebern fever kicked in, and now Adomian’s reviving it, with fellow comic Anthony Atamanuik playing opposite him as Donald Trump....

Dance For Life, presented by Chicago Dancers United, celebrates its 30th year of bringing Chicago dancers together to raise money for The Dancers’ Fund with a performance on August 26 featuring ten dance companies and a new work by Randy Duncan. Founded in 1991 in response to the AIDS crisis by Keith Elliott, a dancer with Joseph Holmes Chicago Dance Theatre, with Todd Kiech, Harriet Ross, Danny Kopelson, and Gail Kalver, Dance for Life and the Dancers’ Fund offer financial aid for dancers with critical health-care needs....

As long as live music is still a thing, concertgoers will argue the merits of the early show versus the late show. Both have their advantages, but depending on your job, a later show means less chance you’ll miss out on a song or two because you’re tied up with work. How does the time of day influence the atmosphere of a show? For that matter, are some types of music better suited for certain hours than others?...

Late last week, Metro and Smart Bar announced they’d added a member to their family: talent buyer Christen Thomas! She plays in Chicago posthardcore band Storm Clouds, but more important, she’d been lead talent buyer at the Empty Bottle since 2012—she tells Gossip Wolf that she left at the end of January. Thomas says that part of what inspired her to go for the new job was the team already in place, which includes senior talent buyers Jason Garden and Joe Carsello, an old friend....