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A 2018 XLR8R profile of German producer Stefan Kozalla, aka DJ Koze, mentioned his predilection for telling the press that when he was a child his parents had left him in a Marrakesh forest with just an Akai MPC. It’s a totally batshit yarn, but it provides an illuminating way to approach his music. His third album, May’s Knock Knock (Pampa), meanders through the woods of pop music’s past, gathering its wildest roots, most beautiful flora, and squiggliest fauna and merging them into a kaleidoscope of sound....

Cold Beaches are one of the most aptly named bands I’ve discovered this year: their new album, Drifter, evokes a decidedly beachy but sometimes gloomy world that makes me think of walking along an east-coast oceanfront in the fall. The band started as the solo project of Chicago singer-songwriter and guitarist Sophia Nadia, who grew up in the Maryland suburbs of D.C. After spending a few years in Richmond, Virginia, where she wrote and self-released Cold Beaches’ 2016 debut, Aching, she moved here in 2017....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Tuesday, October 4, 2016. City treasurer Summers to divest $25 million from Wells Fargo due to scandal The city of Chicago will divest $25 million from Wells Fargo bank, which has “admitted to opening potentially millions of bogus client accounts,” according to Bloomberg. “The City Treasurer is proud to stand with working families from Chicago and across the nation by divesting in Wells Fargo & Co....

Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place. Older strips are archived here.

Even before Alicia Greco moved from Buffalo, New York, to Chicago in November 2017, she knew she wanted to start a party series that centered women and nonbinary DJs. She was already DJing herself, under the name Leesh, but she figured she wouldn’t be able to launch an event and simultaneously find her bearings in a new city. After she arrived, she decided to pursue the same goal—spotlighting contemporary dance artists from marginalized gender communities—with a podcast instead....

Twenty years ago, actor Cherry Jones gave an interview to the industry trade Backstage, where she called out one of the problems facing those hoping to make acting their profession. Bullard notes that, due to COVID, this past year was the first time that the Theatre School didn’t have an incoming class of MFA candidates in the acting program. “The reason was not many people would choose a year of remote training for their first year,” he says....

AP Photo/Seth Perlman Wait until you see his office. Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. • That longtime WFMT and Sun-Times arts critic Andrew Patner has died? —Mike Sula • About the best way to talk to anti-vaxers? —Drew Hunt

The famously vegetarian state of Gujarat in northwestern India is also famously dry. And yet after dark in many large cities, out come the laaris, street food carts, many trafficking in an endless variety of egg dishes well-suited to meet the restorative demands of anyone who happens to have imbibed. Eggs—boiled, fried, folded into omelets, simmered in curries, swaddled in chapati, scrambled with rice, or even sandwiched between grilled white bread—are a popular street food (and hangover preventative) all over India....

In the last few days, we’ve been having one of those feeding frenzies in which the powers that be who run our fair city create some manufactured crisis so we open our mouths and they collectively shovel in some bullshit. With that, Janice Jackson joined the ranks of exalted mayoral appointees whose tenure we, the ordinary citizens, must forever praise with gratitude. ’Cause without them, we’d be lost. And what is the lesson to be learned from Jackson’s time as school boss?...

Pig Destroyer have been at the forefront of grindcore for more than 20 years, and over that time they’ve found a way to push the notoriously rigid style into far-reaching spaces. Helmed by guitarist Scott Hull (also the mastermind behind psychotic “cybergrind” outfit Agoraphobic Nosebleed), the Virginia band started out playing fairly standard grindcore in the 90s: 30-second songs with tortured screams, incomprehensible high-end riffs, and nonstop blastbeats. As the decades have passed, their songs have slowly gotten longer, their rhythms more complex, and the fidelity of their albums more atmospheric....

This week’s poster is by Chicago designer and musician Emily Burlew, who came to Chicago from New Jersey to attend Columbia College and graduated from its music-business program in 2019. Burlew creates posters for bars and events, and occasionally does artwork for bands, including her own current group, Late Nite Laundry (she plays bass). The poster advertises a streaming performance debuting this week on the Noonchorus platform. Chicago-based garage-soul band Hollyy are playing a concert to benefit two vital nonprofit organizations: the Chicago Independent Venue League and Skateistan....

Generally speaking, cinephiles love onscreen gangsters. As the writer-director of the gangsteresque dramedy Hustlers, Lorene Scafaria, recently told the New York Times, “we can name 1,000 of those characters by their first and last names. We’ve enjoyed them.” Indeed, Hustlers feels akin to the crime films of both Martin Scorsese (Goodfellas, Casino) and Adam McKay (The Big Short, Vice). This movie too is zingy, surreal, and wildly entertaining. The key difference between it and the many great films that depict men doing horrible things for understandable reasons—love, money, power—is that Hustlers asks, why not women?...

The title town of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri seems like the very model of traditional small-town America, radiating charm and tranquility. Neighbors keep in touch, and the crime rate is so low that the police station shuts down at night. But after the savage rape and murder of a local teenager goes unsolved for seven months, the victim’s fed-up mother, Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand), rents three billboards outside town and uses them to shame the popular police chief, Willoughby (Woody Harrelson)....

Rainforest Cafe’s demise was not entirely unexpected. In December 2019, the Woodfield Mall location was replaced with a Peppa Pig World of Play. When Jon and I went for our fateful meal, the vines covering the walls were dusty. The mist from the wishing well waterfall filled the restaurant with the smell of musty chlorine. Even the animatronic jungle creatures were over it. The leopard’s tail swung slowly; Tracy Tree’s human eyes twitched with exhaustion....

The Age of Adaline Warning: This post contains spoilers. Steve Martin in All of Me The motif of the uncanny double is much older than movies—it’s central to Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors and Dostoevsky’s The Double, to name the first two examples that come to mind. Yet Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and its many imitators confirm that this motif also resonates in cinema. James Stewart’s attempt to fashion Kim Novak’s Judy Barton into a duplicate of the dead woman she resembles is a rich metaphor for what most narrative filmmakers do when they make any actor conform to their image of a fictional character....

More than 100 years after its publication, E.M. Forster’s classic novel about family, love, and class in a rapidly evolving society is experiencing a renaissance due to its uncanny relevance in today’s world of income inequality and digital disconnection. A Kenneth Lonergan-penned miniseries aired in 2017, Claudia Stevens and Allen Shearer’s chamber opera set in America premiered earlier this year, and now Remy Bumppo’s first commissioned piece brings the expansive dramedy to the stage in a new adaptation....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Monday, October 2, 2017. More than 1,000 people turned out for funeral of Kenneka Jenkins More than 1,000 people attended 19-year-old Kenneka Jenkins’s funeral at the House of Hope Church on the south side Saturday. Many of the attendees never knew Jenkins and learned of her mysterious death through social media. Jenkins was found dead in a freezer in a Rosemont hotel September 10, and her strange death quickly gained national attention and spurred conspiracy theories....

I’ll get to the TIFs in a minute, but first, a few words about the district’s priceless new infomercial, “CPS: Success Starts Here,” released just in time for the start of the school year. They even use that uplifting background music to underscore the heartfelt testimonials of parents, students, and teachers—well, OK, one teacher. At the end, each person looks at the camera and declares: “I am CPS.” Claypool: “We are here in the central office to support our principals and teachers who do the actual work in the classrooms....

Twenty-nine years ago, when Curious Theatre Branch cofounders Jenny Magnus and Beau O’Reilly hunkered down with a handful of struggling fringe artists to create the inaugural Rhinoceros Theater Festival, they insisted that submissions would be accepted only if they met at least two of three criteria: new, local, and good. Which meant new, local, bad work could get in. “And yes indeed, it did,” says Magnus. There will also an art exhibit, “Zone Rats: The Afterlives of the Fabulous Killjoys,” curated by Vicki Walden and daughter Maci Greenberg, featuring international fan art inspired by characters in My Chemical Romance’s album Danger Days, as well as Saturday-morning workshops from CreativePush Collective, designed to help get your half-finished creative project closer to the finish line....

Dear Cecil: Years ago I was deer hunting on my friend’s farm in Ohio. As the sun rose I noticed I was in the middle of a large cow pasture. Some cows walked toward me slowly. When they were about 100 feet away, I decided I had better leave. As I was walking I could see the cows picking up their pace. I got pretty nervous and decided to run toward a fence....