“It is that experience of reading a book which can most politicize and most radicalize people,” says Anthony Arnove, a founding editor and editorial board member of Haymarket Books, Chicago’s foremost progressive publisher. Founded in 2001, Haymarket has grown in tandem with the rising popularity of political organizations such as the Democratic Socialists of America. Haymarket’s editors have bet on a hunger for leftist classics, Howard Zinn-inspired people’s histories, politically engaged poetry and children’s books, and on new work from marginalized voices, and they’ve had notable success with a number of titles, Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me, Naomi Klein’s No Is Not Enough, and Eve Ewing’s Electric Arches among them....

It hasn’t always been blindingly obvious that Hedwig and the Angry Inch is a riff on Plato’s “Symposium.” But the Greek fable it offers about the origin of love is at the heart of this hard-rock musical by John Cameron Mitchell (book) and Stephen Trask (music and lyrics) about “a mere slip of a girly boy from Communist East Germany” who became “the internationally ignored songstress barely standing before you.”...

Chicago singer-songwriter Ben Klawans, aka Mormon Toasterhead, first got my attention four years ago with 97% Old, which boiled down 90s emo to its melodic skeleton and reassembled it in disfigured but disarming new shapes. Klawans experiments restlessly with genre, but as strange as his music can get, it almost always preserves its pop hooks and emotional center. Last week he dropped his first full-length in nearly two years, Monocarpic—it’s the only thing he’s posted to Bandcamp since 2015’s Slack Tide, excepting the May release of “Bright Green,” the first single from the new album....

Cheer-Accident has been Chicago’s most ambitious and versatile prog-rock band for decades, but within the sprawl of its intricate arrangements and bizarre humor the beauty and tunefulness of much of its material can get lost. If anything characterizes the band’s new album, Fades (Skin Graft), it’s those melodic gifts: on opening track “Done,” one of numerous cuts with guest vocalists (Elizabeth Breen and Lindsay Weinberg, in this case), the band clings to post-motorik grooves, and on “The Mind-Body Experience,” a flinty art-rock song a la Henry Cow, the plaintive singing of the band’s sole founding member, Thymme Jones, recalls the tender fragility of Robert Wyatt....

A few years ago Swedish producer Armand Jakobsson coped with a painful breakup by binge-watching Seinfeld and crafting beautiful, glacially paced house tracks. He’d previously recorded music under various aliases (he preferred the name Rimbaudian), but in 2016, when he released the heartfelt cuts he’d created during that emotional healing process, he chose a new moniker: DJ Seinfeld. The sooty veneer and nostalgic, sentimental mood of the music, combined with the fact that Jakobsson debuted it at a time when an handful of artists with similar sonic proclivities were introducing their own projects under goofy names (Ross From Friends, anyone?...

The biggest thing we recommend you do this coming week is find some way to enjoy the sunshine and hot temperatures that are predicted (and a special shout-out to my fellow fans of air conditioning—we’ll always have the public library at least). Here’s some things to enjoy over the next few days, from music to art to the Alley. (Don’t worry, just read on.) Stay safe and enjoy! Through 7/31, times vary: Wrightwood 659 presents “Yannis Tsarouchis: Dancing in Real Life,” the first American exhibition devoted to the work of Greek artist Tsarouchis (1910-1989), who was regarded as a significant member of the Greek LGBTQ community....

A couple weeks ago I was in Germany, and the end of my trip included a visit to the Moers Festival, whose reputation had been impressed upon me long ago by a series of superb live recordings made at the event (and released by its label) in the late 70s and early 80s by the likes of Fred Anderson, Philip Wilson, John Carter, Anthony Braxton, Phalanx, and Wadada Leo Smith. These days the fest isn’t as thoroughly devoted to free jazz as it was when it began in 1972, but in general it does present adventurous sounds....

In January, Gossip Wolf got obsessed with The Year of Alone, a handmade cassette by local singer-songwriter Hannah Sandoz that’s full of hushed and atmospheric folk that seems to encapsulate the COVID-19 era’s sadness and isolation as well as any music that’s come out in the past 18 months. This week, Sandoz followed it up with To Love and Loss!, which has all of the earlier tape’s rustic charm and sweeping feelings of melancholy....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Tuesday, March 15, 2016. Happy primary day! Don’t forget to vote! Could the canceled Chicago rally be the beginning of widespread protests against Trump? The “postponed” Donald Trump rally at University of Illinois at Chicago has empowered citizens outraged by Trump’s divisive rhetoric to speak out and protest against the Republican presidential candidate. The New Yorker‘s John Cassidy believes it is only the beginning—but also thinks the protests could provoke more anger from Trump supporters and spiral into violence....

In 2010, Chicago underground music maven Patrick Scott (formerly of My Lai and 97-Shiki) launched postpunk label Modern Tapes with the self-titled debut cassette from Carbondale coldwave three-piece Staring Problem. The band have since relocated to Chicago, and Scott now lives in New York City, but their relationship has remained intact: Staring Problem’s first vinyl full-length, Eclipse, arrives as Modern Tapes celebrates its tenth anniversary. Eclipse wears its DIY pride on its sleeve, and the rawness and cavernous echo of Staring Problem’s lo-fi recordings keep their most skeletal arrangements from sounding too thin....

Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day and welcome to the Reader’s morning briefing for January 18, 2016. Remember the following are closed for the holiday: Chicago Public Library locations, Chicago Public Schools locations, most suburban schools, banks, government offices, post offices, and courts (except Cook County central bond court). Stay warm! Good news for Chicago Public Schools teachers fearing pink slips Chicago Public Schools chief Forrest Claypool warned of layoffs coming down February 8, which would mean pink slips would have to go out today....

It’s a dangerous thing to attempt to categorize Stanley Tigerman, but it’s probably safe to say that Chicago’s resident architectural curmudgeon is not a preservationist. “My buildings—I’ll be happy if one or two show up in the history books,” he said. “But save them? I don’t think so.” Tigerman is in a wheelchair and on oxygen, and says he “feels as embattled now as ever,” but nothing kept him from speaking without notes for an hour and half, explaining—among other things—the most glaring contradiction in his famously nonconforming career: his reverence for Mies....

A copper thief knocked out power and shut down Antique Taco’s Bridgeport location for one of its busiest weekends of the year, but the restaurant has since reopened. The restaurant lost all of the food and prepared drinks it had on hand. It did replace the electrical wires with noncopper materials. “I’m sorry to hear this,” wrote one Instagram user. “Please know that the non-vandals in the neighborhood appreciate all you do for our community....

A couple weeks ago, local indie-rock four-piece Corolla dropped two breezy tunes fit for the dwindling days of summer: “Forget This Song” and “Fading.” Formed by guitarist-vocalist Carlos Lowenstein and drummer John Dugan (formerly of Chisel and the Chicago Stone Lightning Band), Corolla solidified their relaxed underground-pop sound with the addition of bassist Ben Taylor (formerly of JC Brooks & the Uptown Sound) and lead guitarist Erik Cameron. The new songs—the band’s first releases since the July 2019 EP Falling—were recorded at a pre-pandemic session, which also produced four other tracks that will be released in pairs later in 2020....

Al Bello/Getty Images Spike Lee is looking for the next Jesus Shuttlesworth. Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. • Nate Silver on the why “diverse” almost never means “unsegregated”? —Aimee Levitt • That Hold Still, the new memoir by photographer Sally Mann, “dials open the aperture on your own senses,” according to Dwight Garner’s NYT review? —Steve Bogira

Donny Benét cuts a memorable figure—he plays up a lothario image in his music and often wears a bright white or salmon pink blazer straight out of Miami Vice. The Australian multi-instrumentalist’s look is seemingly crafted for maximum “Is he serious or not?” confusion, especially since Benét’s chosen paradigm is sly synth-dominated 80s disco-pop with a heavy bass groove. But there’s a huge gulf between disingenuous pastiche and a loving albeit tongue-in-cheek tribute to another era, and Benét clearly has a lot of admiration for his disco forebears....

I’m a longtime fan of Mexican singer Natalia Lafourcade, one of Latin America’s most sophisticated and curious pop stars. I wrote about her when she rolled through town in summer 2017 in support of the gorgeous Musas, which surveys some of her favorite ballads from Latin America—a collection foreshadowed by her brilliant 2012 album saluting the music of Mexican composer Agustín Lara, Mujer Divina. In February she released the second volume of the Musas project, and it overwhelmed me with its beauty and soul, just as part one did....

In the early hours of Friday, November 6, 26-year-old Chicago rapper Dayvon Bennett, better known as King Von, was shot and killed outside an Atlanta nightclub. Von emerged a couple years ago as part of a newer generation of locals refashioning drill’s austere, hard-edged aesthetic in their own image. He imbued his tough-as-nails verses with touches of sweet melodicism, and he could evoke joy and alarm with just a few steely lines delivered in a tight, bouncy flow....

Local rappers Jed Sed and Walter J. Liveharder have an affinity for Wes Anderson. A couple years ago Jed and Walter teamed up as O.R. They?—their name comes from a scene in Rushmore where Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman) gets called out for passive-aggressively misidentifying the work clothes worn by Dr. Peter Flynn (Luke Wilson) as a nurse’s uniform. When Flynn explains that they’re actually O.R. scrubs, Fischer replies, “Oh, are they?...

Time to plan the weekend. Here’s some of what we recommend: Sat 3/5: Waffle Fest 6 hits the Empty Bottle (1035 N. Western) tonight, and will feature Jeremiah Jae, 7oddz, D2G, Pinqy Ring, Slot A, and more. In Soundboard Leor Galil writes, “Jae takes to the beats as if they were his own, delivering Lego-like constructions of words that nearly overlap—it’s as though he’s vibing off the pulse of each track’s instrumental while a different one careens around inside his head....