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Many bands associated with famous DIY punk label SST Records have been enshrined for posterity, but SoCal rippers Saccharine Trust, who combined gloomy punk, wiggly free jazz, and other weirdness during SST’s 80s heyday, haven’t gotten their due. In 2000, local filmmaker Jim Sikora released My Char-Broiled Burger With Brewer, which he describes as a “portrait of an old and enduring friendship between two musicians—one who is very successful (Mike Watt of the Minutemen and the Stooges) and the other (Jack Brewer of Saccharine Trust) who is sliding into obscurity....

“I didn’t relate to being a rock star at all” is a strange sentiment from someone who played Monterey Pop, but Michael Bloomfield was no ordinary guitarist. Growing up in the northern suburbs of Chicago in the 1950s, Bloomfield learned to play by mimicking the blues artists he heard on his transistor radio, tuning in AM frequencies from Chicago’s south side and as far away as Texas. In the early 60s he was a fixture on Chicago’s music scene, playing and producing shows that melded rock, blues, pop, and jazz for rapt audiences....

Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. • About the original LOLcat photographer? —Brianna Wellen

When Raquel Monroe thinks of democracy, she envisions a certain freedom. “I was interested in pictures . . . the way that the bodies are seated or the way that the bodies are still, they feel as if they are about to step up out of the camera,” she says. “They’re about to move.” Sharon Bloyd-Peshkin, an associate professor of journalism, curated a collection about photojournalism and the role of free press in democracy, both in history and today....

Al Podgorski /Sun-Times Media Rahm Emanuel during Friday’s debate in front of the Sun-Times editorial board. “Rather than leading the country with people leaving, we’re leading the country with families coming back,” Rahm Emanuel said Friday during a mayoral debate at the Sun-Times. But Chicago in this “study” doesn’t mean Chicago proper, because the rankings were of metro areas. Other moving companies publish similar annual “migration” rankings. They give the companies a burst of free publicity when media write about the rankings—as Crain’s Chicago Business did in September, after United Van Lines announced last year’s “findings....

The Reader’s archive is vast and varied, going back to 1971. Every day in Archive Dive, we’ll dig through and bring up some finds. In the comedy community, Brian Posen, executive director of Stage 773, stepped down amid allegations of sexual misconduct; he’d already been removed from his position as head of Second City’s beginner improv training program after several women complained about his behavior. The debate in the comedy community goes on about whether men need to change their collective behavior....

David Bowie A New Career in a New Town (1977-1982) (Parlophone) $106.99, $206.82 for vinyl David Bowie’s personas were often inseparable from the records he made. You might even say that he had only one—a persona of constant artistic reinvention—and that his music changed along with it. He displayed this mastery of self-transformation most dramatically during his so-called Berlin period, which began in 1977. Collaborating with producer Brian Eno, he radically revamped his sound and methodology, adopting Eno’s approach to the studio as an instrument unto itself....

Ask a child to name the most annoying things adults do for fun, and “drive around looking at houses” might top the list. “We’re just looking around,” Mom or Dad would say. Then I’d take her out for a drive around Chicago’s affluent north suburbs—Wilmette, Kenilworth, Winnetka, Glencoe, Highland Park, Lake Forest, and Lake Bluff—which offer a fascinating sampler of residential architecture of the late 19th and 20th centuries: Italian-style villas, French chateaus, and American takes on English country houses designed by the likes of David Adler, Arthur Heun, and Howard Van Doren Shaw; Prairie-style homes by Frank Lloyd Wright and his contemporaries (John Van Bergen, Dwight H....

Gossip Wolf got hip to local dream-pop singer-songwriter Claudia Ferme-Giralt, who performs and records as Claude, via her standout 2019 single “Turn” and an immaculate live set opening for Jimmy Whispers and Jungle Green at the Hideout that fall. On Friday, February 12, Claude will finally drop her debut EP, Enactor, via Side Hustle Records (run by staffers at music PR firm Big Hassle Media). Its six sparkling songs are beautifully sparse and glacially paced, and lead single “Screen” (with a video by queer filmmaking collective Bitchcraft) feels especially timely: it captures the disquiet of being confined to communicating through digital technology....

In 2018, Jori Apedaile moved his one-man atmospheric metal project, Eneferens, to Minneapolis from Montana, and he’ll soon be moving back. But for what he lost in isolation and scenic landscapes during his time in Minnesota, he gained in solidifying his sound. Last fall he released his third album under the Eneferens name, The Bleakness of Our Constant (Nordvis), whose nearly nine-minute “Weight of the Mind’s Periapt” summons its dreamy clean vocals and ethereal harmonies from within a maelstrom of growls and riffs, leaving the album’s title phrase floating in the ether and fading into the oceanic intro of “11:34....

Unless your mom is Cambodian, it seems like every time there’s an opportunity to eat Khmer food in Chicago, it’s the only opportunity. The first time I wrote about it, way back in 2008, there were no restaurants serving it, but twice a year, with a sincere offering to the monks of Uptown’s Watt Khmer Metta on Cambodian New Year, or Ancestors’ Day, you could join in a post-ceremonial feast of outstanding food made by a lot of moms....

Q: I’m a 29-year-old straight male. I’ve been with my 25-year-old partner for six years. I love her and think that we are perfect for each other. We have all the things that make existing with someone wonderful. But about two years into our relationship I had a two-week-long affair while I was out of the country. I fucked up. I came clean to my partner and we’ve done our best to work through this over the last four years, but it has obviously caused some trust issues between us....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Friday, November 10, 2017. Have a great weekend, and Happy Veterans Day! Despite plea from Chance the Rapper, City Council approves $95 million police training academy The City Council voted in favor of Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s plan for a $95 million police and fire training academy in West Garfield Park Wednesday despite a highly publicized plea from Chance the Rapper to consider other ways of spending the money, such as mental health clinics....

Joel Ryan/Invision/AP This man has no idea what a cosmological mess he’s made. Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. • Or hear information designer Nicholas Felton on whether data gives life meaning? —Sue Kwong • About the cancellation of some long-running community-based talk shows on WLUW in favor of more airtime for Loyola students? —John Dunlevy

Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. • The Tribune‘s Chris Jones’s call for artists to fix what’s wrong with Chicago? —Aimee Levitt • How it’ll be hard for artists to fix what’s wrong with Chicago because art is largely irrelevant? —Ryan Smith

Ultima II Massage Do Division weekend kicks off this afternoon, and along with the street fest comes a bunch of great aftershows happening at Empty Bottle and Subterranean. Tonight, Tobacco will be headlining a sold-out show at the Bottle, and today’s 12 O’Clock Track is “Video Warning Attempts,” off of his 2014 release Ultima II Massage. Perhaps best known as the front man of Pittsburgh-based experimental-rock collective Black Moth Super Rainbow, Tobacco (born Thomas Fec) has carved out a supercool solo career over the past handful of years, creating twisted electronic psych....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Thursday, November 30, 2017. Chicago takes another step in the O’Hare express-train journey Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s dream of an express train from downtown to O’Hare International Airport is one step closer. Emanuel is issuing a request for qualifications “for respondents to offer their credentials to design, build, finance, operate and maintain an express service through a public-private partnership with Chicago,” according to the Tribune....

After what some say was an unprecedented pattern of violence against people experiencing homelessness in Chicago last year, activists are calling on the city to better investigate these crimes and to do more for the victims. In July 2020, fires occurred nearly simultaneously at encampments at Belmont and Kedzie, Belmont and Kimball, and Diversey and California, according to police reports. Another Belmont-Kedzie encampment burned in October, and police reports from the July and October fires say encampment residents, many of whom lost all of their belongings, believed the fires were an act of arson....

It’s a slightly rainy late November evening and the lights are all on at Pilsen Community Books. I’ve come here to attend a live recording of Eye 94, a weekly program on Lumpen Radio 105.5 FM that dives deep into the culture of publishing, authors, and books. It’s the only terrestrial radio show currently airing in the midwest that is completely devoted to books and writers, and possibly the first Chicago radio show to do so since Milt Rosenberg’s Extension 720 on WGN AM ended in 2012....

Chicago singer-songwriter Jess Shoman started her folk-leaning project Tenci in her bedroom a little more than a year ago. Spencer Radcliffe & Everyone Else, who opened Tenci’s first show last December at the Hungry Brain, had helped her get the project out of the house. Before that gig, Everyone Else vocalist Tina Scarpello had joined Shoman’s burgeoning band as a bassist and brought early demos of the songs to Radcliffe, who eventually produced and played guitar, sax, and piano on Tenci’s debut album, the new My Heart Is an Open Field (Hobbies)....