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A Back in Chicago, Rothenberg returned to Spertus and began thinking about the relationship between her photos and the various objects in the archives and how they connected to the institute’s gallery space. “I didn’t want to talk about individuals,” she says. “I wanted to talk about systems.” She found she could get the sense of historical distance and disorientation she was aiming for by photographing objects from oblique angles. A photo of a passport of a Jewish refugee who came to the United States via Mexico, for instance, focuses on the taped and frayed edge of the cover, not the information inside about its owner....

widens into a moving vista of modern Europe.” Check out our 16-film roundup of the festival, which runs all through March. Also this week, Fred Camper has the lowdown on the Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival, with four installations and nine shorts programs screening through the weekend at Defibrillator Gallery. And check out our new issue for capsule reviews of: London Has Fallen, an action flick about terrorists swinging England like a pendulum; The Wave, billed as the first Norwegian disaster flick; and Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, starring Tina Fey as an American journalist in Kabul....

Some people dance to the beat of a different drum, but choreographer and director Faye Driscoll beats the drum of a different dance. At first, her performances seem spasmodic or juvenile; the cast behave like kids in a kindergarten class after they’ve chased Pop Rocks with Pepsi. But Driscoll often addresses adult subject matter—most prominently, sex—and her pieces are so obviously structured that it’s impossible to accuse them of being thrown together....

Looking for a good time? One night of fun that you will likely soon forget? NSA? Some BDSM and possible VBD? Then come all over Grindr the Opera at Pride Films and Plays, a comedic skewering of the modern gay-dating scene. This well-written, over-the-top musical by Erik Ransom stars Grindr (Bruno Rivera), an operatic siren who lures four gay archetypes as her aficionados: Devon (Justin Cavazos), the starry-eyed idealist; Tom (Ben Broughton), the experienced skeptic; Jack (Evan Wilhelm), the adventurous twink; and Don (director John Cardone), the in-the-closet daddy....

As a serious young grunger, I was determined to turn over every mossy Seattle-sounding rock. In addition to the big boys (though we all knew Pearl Jam were poseurs), I was a fan of sub-poppin’ bands including Skin Yard, Green Magnet School, and the Fluid. The scene wasn’t all hairy dudes, but few of the gnarly lady bands really thrilled me. L7 were a different story. The foursome’s second album, 1990’s Smell the Magic, seemed to have it all: hilariously snarky lyrics, style to spare, and crunchy, catchy tunes (especially the fist-pumpin’ single “Shove”)....

When I guzzled camel milk from the Muslim Women Resource Center Community Discount Store on Devon last summer, I discovered something: camel protein is where it’s at. It’s also at Eric Grill in West Rogers Park. Eric Grill, 6319 N. Ridge, 773-754-7710

Cellist Sæunn Thorsteinsdóttir performs with orchestras and smaller ensembles all around the globe and teaches at the University of Washington in Seattle. But Vernacular, her new CD on Sono Luminus, affirms her Icelandic roots even as it acknowledges her geographic distance from her native land. Thorsteinsdóttir has lived outside Iceland most of her life, and the four Icelandic composers whose work she performs on this recital have likewise lived abroad for extended periods....

Demilich released just one album, Nespithe, before breaking up in 1993, and its 39 minutes of music have secured their reputation as one of the weirdest, most original, and most prescient bands in technical death metal for 25 years and counting. Nespithe is a lurid, aggressively metastasizing web of alien convolutions, gonzo metrical collages, and disorienting rhythms, all of it tangled in spidery guitars that dance like the floor is covered in broken glass—and its songs still somehow groove like hell, albeit with a feel that’s more peristaltic than it is funky....

Michael Brosilow Alana Arenas and Tim Hopper Steppenwolf’s production of David Adjmi’s Marie Antoinette plunges you into the experience from the moment you hit your seat: two wide projection screens take you on a bird’s-eye tour of Versailles, swooping in and out over the colossal structures a la the opening credits of Game of Thrones. The play’s performed in the round in the intimate upstairs theater, the audience lined up on two sides as if we’re spectators at a tennis match (quite appropriately, given the Tennis Court Oath)....

Oopey Mason Photography Darth Vader made it out to Flat Iron Comedy’s opening night. Since the 1980s the Flat Iron Arts Building has served as an artistic commune, giving local creatives a place to work, perform, even live. Earlier this month the building became home to its first artist-run comedy venue. The people behind the Collaboraction space offered up their salon stage for local comedians Michael Brunlieb, Harrison George, Scott Goldstein, and Alex Honnet to realize their vision of an anything-goes comedy space, Flat Iron Comedy....

In their effort to re-do last year’s mayoral election, the principals of Chicago yesterday elected Troy LaRaviere over Mayor Emanuel in the race for the presidency of their association. It’s easy to understand why principals might’ve opted for a more Karen Lewis-like leader to deal with the mayor. Principals, arguably, have been hit even harder than teachers by the mayor’s education policies; unlike teachers, principals have to pretend they agree with the mayor’s cuts and closings, as well as his testing, curriculum, and privatization programs....

Enforced mass social isolation can really make you crave constant stimuli. As each day feels longer than the one before, the slow crawl of hours makes the frenetic dance music on Blood Blood Blood Blood Blood—the latest howler from Chicago-based producer RXM Reality, aka Mike Meegan—sound like a salve. It’s Meegan’s sixth album under that name and his most tightly crafted yet, brimming with ideas. “Exhale” evolves from glossy synth arpeggios to cryptic, fumbling beats, then employs an angelic vocal sample....

In a recent Illanoize Radio interview, south-side rapper Lil Romo said he started to approach his music more professionally in October 2018, after he dropped “Realla (Scrilla Remix),” where he raps like he’s trying to outrun the anxious, zippy instrumental. Since then, his career has seemed to draw on the energy of that track. He’s dropped four singles since February, and most of them have racked up at least 100,000 YouTube views....

The drastic aesthetic differences between the members of Wire are part of what’s made the music of the British postpunk quartet so rich, but they’ve also made it necessary for each of them to step outside the group to explore anything that doesn’t fit into the gridlike results of their collective songwriting process. Guitarist Colin Newman confirmed his mastery at writing barbed pop songs with solo albums such as 1982’s Not To and 1986’s Commercial Suicide, and starting with the 1981 release of Provisionally Entitled the Singing Fish, he’s also been crafting instrumental music....

After organizing a solid platform, devising a shrewd get-out-the-vote strategy, and ironing out countless important details, a political candidate is finally faced with the only electoral decision that actually matters: choosing a soundtrack. The right campaign anthem has the power to crystallize a message or inspire dedicated supporters. It can even achieve the minor miracle of making a very stiff white man in a suit appear slightly less square, if only temporarily....

For Glenn Danzig, the past 15 years have been especially weird. Starting with the infamous 2004 backstage TKO punch delivered by North Side Kings singer Danny Marianino, the Misfits mastermind—in his heyday one of the most enigmatic and distinctive vocalists in punk history—has been on a downward spiral of unintentional self-parody and apparent madness. Every bit of news about Danzig to emerge since then has been strange and hilarious: the onstage meltdowns, the viral shopping-for-cat-litter photo, the bizarre assortment of Looney Tunes collectibles and other pop-culture memorabilia left behind for whoever purchased his former Los Angeles home in 2018....

Sometimes I think it’s best not to read the press materials for a new album too closely. Seth Graham, an experimental electronic musician from Dayton, Ohio, has made some claims in the PR for his new record, Gasp, that I’m still trying to wrap my head around. The album comes out next Friday via Orange Milk, which he runs with Keith Rankin of Giant Claw, and among other things Graham has said that it was inspired by the “playfulness” of composers such as spectralist Gerard Grisey and minimalist Julius Eastman, who “explore teasing, lighthearted audio elements....

To brine the pork, Pederson used birch beer—made from birch sap and much easier to find than birch syrup—as well as salt, pepper, herbs, and a little birch syrup. After brining it for 12 hours, she cold-smoked it for another ten, noting that the brining and smoking gives it a flavor similar to ham. She cut off a two-inch-thick slice, seared it on all sides, and then added pork stock and birch syrup to the pan before finishing it in the oven....

During a recent All Elite Wrestling (AEW) Dynamite event at the Sears Centre in Hoffman Estates, broadcast live on TNT, one of the AEW’s main talents, Cody Rhodes, stepped into the ring to face off against local wrestler “Marvelous” Matt Knicks. Rhodes is a legacy wrestler—his father Dusty Rhodes was a common adversary of Ric Flair—and is known as one of the good guys in the newly popular AEW promotion. More often than not, if he’s about to fight, the audience is cheering for him....

George Arthur Calendar, a Chicago musician who describes himself as the creator of “some of the most suave and velvety narco synth pop/soul/funk north of Tijuana,” is blindfolded and tied to a chair. “It talks about that kind of relationship when you’re starting to get dependent on someone,” Calendar says. “It’s about when you’re a little bit blind in your situation. You’re so content and wanting to be there, even though it’s not necessarily the right choice....