Dennis J. Leise whistles a high note and a crowd of turkeys, roosters, chickens, and ducks explodes in shrieks, quacks, and clucks. A 250-pound boar named Hamilton grunts as Leise massages his snout. Rabbits snooze on the side porch. Goats box for position to lap up the dry corn he pours from his hand. The video for “Nobody’s Comin’,” directed by Rob Fitzgerald and Dennis J. Leise Leise scheduled a release show for State of Fairs last spring at FitzGerald’s, but the pandemic shut it down....

A fracking site in Pennsylvania, amount of earthquakes TBD Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, amuse, or inspire us. • About the new study published in Nature that shows “trillions of dollars of known and extractable [fossil fuels] cannot be exploited if the global temperature rise is to be kept under the 2C safety limit agreed by the world’s nations”? —Ben Sachs • About the return of a murderous Nazi cow breed?...

Elizabeth Tamny has been immersed in the world of the cookie arts since December. She’s not baking snickerdoodles or Toll House, but rather applying her illustrative and calligraphic skills to sugar and chocolate-mint cookies. The cookies themselves may be fairly simple, but Tamny’s designs are anything but. They’re intricate, sometimes lacy filigrees and grids of royal icing, piped in thin lines that swirl and intersect, sometimes rising above the surface in elaborate, delicate spires and domes that echo the towering confectionary structures of the Napoleonic-era French chef Marie-Antoine Carême....

Depending on who you talk to, 46th Ward alderman James Cappleman is either a cold, deceitful hater of the poor who’s destroyed much of Uptown’s affordable housing stock or a friendly, responsive neighborhood booster who’s made Uptown a better place to live. Far from being a firebrand retail politician, Cappleman has a soft-spoken manner. He grew up on the Gulf of Mexico, near Houston, and has a silky voice with the slightest twinge of a southern accent....

I was starting to think we’d crossed a line and that there was no one, except for a few old lefties like me, willing to denounce such blatantly cynical attempts to soak the taxpayers. Deal said the tax break would enable Delta to expand service at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson airport. Similarly, up north in Wisconsin, Governor Scott Walker, another Republican, forked over $4.1 billion for a Foxconn factory. It won’t necessarily raises taxes in Illinois, but we will have to deal with pollution issues since the Wisconsin deal has waived Foxconn from environmental oversight regulations....

Mackenzie Scott is the kind of artist who can turn a song about peach cobbler into a sweeping tale of thwarted lust and bitter memory. The lyric “I know you never dreamed I’d become a damn Yankee / I need you to believe that I’m still your same baby,” from “Tongue Slap Your Brains Out,” the opening track of her latest album, Three Futures (4AD), may be the most over-the-top lament of the personal costs of northward migration since Bobby Bare’s “Streets of Baltimore....

Guitarist Rafiq Bhatia has always been something of a polymath. After graduating from Oberlin—with a degree not in music but in economics and neuroscience—he moved to New York in 2010 and his interests gravitated toward modern jazz. Within two years he dropped Yes It Will (Rest Assured), a record built around a limber fusion of sound featuring extended improvisation—his impressive cast of collaborators includes excellent players from both jazz and classical music such as trumpeter Peter Evans, pianist Vijay Iyer, drummer Billy Hart, and flutist Claire Chase....

Even though Indian-American comic Hari Kondabolu was born in Queens, xenophobes frequently tell him to go back to places like Iraq, Afganistan, and Libya. “Whatever nation our country is bombing, I’m told to go back there at the worst time to go back,” he says. But in Denmark, during a particularly awful performance, he was told to go back to America. Maybe that was a sign of how bad things have gotten here in the States, or maybe it was a sign that Kondabolu had finally proven himself as a Mainstream American Comic (Kill Rock Stars), the sarcastic title of his new album....

As the number of new coronavirus infections in Illinois continues to grow, Chicago has finally caught up with testing at some of the city’s homeless shelters. Results shared by the Chicago Department of Public Health at the end of last week showed that among 1,153 clients and staff tested at 14 shelters, 302 people were positive for COVID-19. However, as of May 7, the department couldn’t confirm if anyone has died from the disease....

Chicago rapper Fredrianna Harris, aka Freddie Old Soul, uses hip-hop to open a vivid window into everyday life. On “Hot Tamale,” one of the best tracks off her new self-released EP, The First People, she turns groceries into a narrative device that bundles up seemingly stray musings about young motherhood, COVID-19, and the unrelenting presence of death. Her arch delivery bridges her scattered ideas, and her incisive wordplay demonstrates that some of them were interconnected all along....

Pinball was banned in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City for decades and . . . wait, what? All of the anti-arcade pearl clutching isn’t surprising because, well, the older generation is always suspicious of youth culture, especially when it’s paired with rapidly changing technology (hence modern parents freaking out about their kids’ addiction to the online video game Fortnite). But it’s one thing for games to be frowned on, and another for them to be illicit....

Bars and Measures Troubled jazz bassist Bilal thrives off chaos, while his rock-steady classical pianist brother Eric craves order. Playwright Idris Goodwin tries to squeeze two epic battles from their fraught rivalry. The first concerns their efforts to turn common musical ground into a brotherly demilitarized zone, and the second concerns Bilal’s possible involvement in terrorism and Eric’s struggle to believe his brother’s innocent. It’s potent stuff, even with Goodwin’s reductive musicology and undervetted plotting (Bilal’s a federal detainee yet spends regular time with Eric inventing jazz riffs in an ill-defined prison room), but in only 70 minutes neither story is adequately developed; the evening feels like a highlights reel....

The world was introduced to Nav by his featured verse on “Biebs in the Trap,” off Travis Scott’s landmark 2016 Birds in the Trap Sing McKnight. In its alarmingly candid tale of drug abuse and the party life, Nav proved a good complement to Scott while leaning into the disaffected, robotic rap-singing that the psychedelic trap mastermind had popularized. Nav comes from the same Toronto hip-hop scene as Drake and the Weeknd, so “glassy-eyed confessional” is very much his zone, but the material on his past few releases has felt like he’s trying to play catch-up to his hometown peers with shallow but catchy forays into empty excess....

With its relaxed atmosphere and dependably adventurous programming, Elastic Arts is high on the list of local spots Gossip Wolf has been pining to visit since the pandemic hit—especially because when it suspended in-person events last spring it had just introduced a sensational 16-speaker, 16-channel sound system created by the Chicago Laboratory for Electroacoustic Theatre. This wolf’s next date with the CLEAT system will have to wait, but this month Elastic is ramping up its online programming after staying pretty quiet since the end of September....

Anyone who regularly uses online music-streaming services has probably noticed some important artists missing from cloud-based platforms: Bob Seger, King Crimson, Ash Ra Tempel, DJ Sprinkles, many Drag City artists. OK, maybe I’m the only person who considers these acts important—but hey, sometimes I’m itching to listen to them and there are situations where my physical copies or external hard drive aren’t readily available. Well, knock AC/DC off that list. The rock-hard hard-rockers, in conjunction with today’s Apple Music launch, will make all of their discography available for streaming services, for whenever you get the urge to hear the same riff gloriously played over and over again....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Tuesday, November 14, 2017. Illinois GOP congressman on Moore: “This is a bridge too far and the Republican Party ought to disown every aspect of him” Illinois Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger is calling on his party to “disown” Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, who has been accused of sexually assaulting several women when they were teenagers. “Roy Moore needs to step aside now....

If you’re fond of the loud, outre rock bands that have emerged in Chicago over the past decade or so, Djunah have your number. Front woman Donna Diane (aka Donna Polydoros) and drummer Nick Smalkowski previously played in two of the mightier groups on the scene: Beat Drun Juel and Fake Limbs, respectively. As Beat Drun Juel petered out toward the end of 2017, Diane tinkered with solo sets under the name “Naked, Riding a Lion Made of Fire,” playing guitar and adding bass notes with a foot-operated Moog Taurus pedal synthesizer....

Theresa Rebeck’s acidic portrait of workplace discrimination, written in 1992 in the wake of the Anita Hill hearings, is still timely. That’s probably good news for Rebeck. But it’s definitely bad news for women, who are still dragged as ambitious ballbusters if they dare to do things men do (such as run for president). Compass Theatre, a new Equity company making its debut with Rebeck’s play, staged by Lauren Shouse, lands plenty of sharp jabs to the solar plexus....

Here are a few of our suggestions for how to spend your day on Friday 4/20, the holiest of holy days in cannabis culture. MOCA Special 420 Performance Modern Cannabis Dispensary (MOCA) rewards its patients with two days of concerts. Hip-hop artist Mick Jenkins takes the stage alongside DJ Green Sllime. 8 PM, Emporium Arcade Bar, 1366 N. Milwaukee, 773-697-7922, emporiumchicago.com, $5.

Tod Lending’s documentary All the Difference, which is set in Chicago and screens this weekend at the 22nd annual Black Harvest Film Festival, is an inspirational account of black male ambition and perseverance in the face of some harsh statistics. According to information presented in the documentary, in Chicago’s most underprivileged communities, only about 50 percent of young black men graduate from high school; of those who do graduate, fewer than half will go on to college, and even fewer will graduate from college within four to six years....