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Fred Hunter/In His Image Photo Say it ain’t so, Jackie Robinson West, say it ain’t so. Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. • That Jonathan Elmer has been appointed the new artistic director of the Chicago Humanities Festival, also known as one of the best jobs in Chicago (right up there with head of the MacArthur Foundation)? —Aimee Levitt • That there’s a Frankie Knuckles movie in the works?...

Chicagoans is a first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. This week’s Chicagoan is Dennis Alan, 67, the Ultimate Donald Trump Lookalike. Impersonating Trump has changed my life in that among people who knew me before this, I have become kind of a celebrity. It’s kind of the thing where if you are overweight and then you become thin, your relationships with all the people in your life will change....

In the last week, with the city and state flailing around in their twin oceans of debt and the future of our Paris on the Prairie looking particularly grim, two of Chicago’s most distinctive characters hosted sunny celebrations that were all about making things better through thoughtful redevelopment. This is the second Evanston home Pritzker has turned into a luxury B&B; its sister property, Stone Porch, two doors down at 300 Church Street, won a city preservation award last year....

Gossip Wolf has seen Chicago band Rash play at least half a dozen times, and they never disappoint. Their brutal mix of noise, punk, and hardcore would’ve sounded right at home on Amphetamine Reptile or Touch and Go back in the 90s! On Friday, December 2, Rash will release their debut LP, Skinner Box, on local DIY label High Fashion Industries, and this wolf can’t stop listening—it sounds the way repeatedly bashing your head into a block of concrete feels....

Brian Jackson/ Sun-Times Alderman Bob Fioretti at the November City Council meeting at which Mayor Emanuel’s budget passed over his objection. Fioretti said then that the budget would “further divide the haves and have-nots.” *Or how we imagine Fioretti might correct and clarify his endorsement of Rahm Emanuel On the eve of the February 24 election, I pledged to endorse “anybody but Rahm” if there were a runoff. The “anybody but” part was a slip of the tongue....

It was a long time coming when Logan Arcade owner Jim Zespy followed music producer Steve Albini onstage to introduce the arcade cabinet he’d constructed for a video game starring his friend’s famous cat. “I’ve known Mike for a long time. I never thought I’d be running an arcade and he’d have a world-famous cat,” Zespy said to a crowd of several hundred fans who’d crowded into his arcade bar in Logan Square last Friday night for the game’s premiere party....

Michael Gebert Marcos Carbajal at Carnitas Uruapan If you order carnitas at a chain burrito place, you will likely get roasted, shredded pork shoulder. For Marcos Carbajal, that’s like using “barbecue” to mean only one kind of meat. “There’s shoulders, there’s ribs, there’s pork belly, there’s pork skin,” he says, pointing to each on a styrofoam plate we’ve just been handed at his family’s restaurant, Carnitas Uruapan in Pilsen. “Usually the shoulders and the ribs are the top two choices for beginning eaters....

An Illinois appellate court handed police accountability activists a major victory Friday when it ruled that all police misconduct records going back to 1967 are subject to Freedom of Information Act requests. But now the Fraternal Order of Police, Chicago’s police union, says it plans to appeal the decision in a last ditch effort to block public access to the records. In compliance with this ruling, the city made an unprecedented move toward transparency, and prepared to release all records pertaining to misconduct for every Chicago police officer dating back to 1967....

Preservation Chicago announced the 2020 edition of its annual list of the city’s “7 Most Endangered Buildings” today, with the James R. Thompson Center and Jackson Park each making their fourth appearance. Jackson Park, South Shore Cultural Center, and Midway Plaisance Designed by George W. Maher and Son in 1924 and built in 1925, the former club is owned by Misericordia, which plans to demolish it to make way for new housing....

A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. Wingtips, Exposure Therapy ‘Tis that season when I, like many other music writers, scramble to answer the question: “What great new music did I miss this year?” Well, when it comes to Chicago releases, the debut album from gothic postpunk duo Wingtips (aka Vincent Segretario and Hannah Avalon) certainly makes that list. Mixing dreamy pop and cold darkwave, it can make long winter nights feel a little more magical....

A pivotal scene in Sean Baker’s The Florida Project comes near the end of the film. Six-year-old Moonee (Brooklynn Prince) is eating breakfast at an Orlando hotel near the one where she lives with her mother, Halley (Bria Vinaite). Baker presents the little girl in close-up as she samples each item she took from the dining-room buffet and makes some cute comment about it, and he uses jump cuts to skip from one sampling to the next....

Von Freeman Pavilion Noon | James Sanders Proyecto Libre Local violinist James Sanders is accustomed to moving between genres: he plays classical music with the Chicago Sinfonietta, straight-ahead jazz with the Blue Violin Quartet, and Latin dance with Conjunto. Proyecto Libre is Sanders’s take on free jazz, but it’s hardly a free-for-all—rather it’s a band where he’s free to mix it all up. Bassists Joshua Abrams and Harrison Bankhead spend as much time grooving with percussionist Jean-­Christophe Leroy and drummer Avreeayl Ra as they do weaving rich, intricate harmonies with Sanders and saxophonist Edward Wilkerson Jr....

Bassist and vocalist Margaret McCarthy began releasing music as Moontype while enrolled in Oberlin’s music conservatory. She began with a 2017 self-released EP called Fan Music, in which drifty singing, plucking, and strumming are barely audible through what sounds like the hum of a box fan. McCarthy shifted to more traditional songwriting with 2018’s Bass Tunes, Year 5, which she released upon graduating from school in June of that year; it’s a bare indie-rock album built from her steady, gentle bass and overdubbed layers of yearning vocals....

Update: The D-Composed concert with Mosaic Vocal Ensemble on April 5 at Saint Benedict the African Catholic Church has been canceled. To foreground Black composers, Coleman initially wanted to organize a series of concerts. D-Composed arose out of that effort. The quartet plays a wide range of material, including classical and trap music, and it prefers small rooms—cafes, galleries, private ballrooms, Chicago Park District facilities—rather than conventional concert halls. Its programming includes Family Edition shows (so far they’ve all been at the Stony Island Arts Bank) and D-Compressed yoga shows (at the Museum of Contemporary Art, though the group hopes to branch out to various yoga studios)....

Deeply Rooted Dance Theater (DRDT), founded in 1995, has been transitioning for over a year. In September 2019, founding artistic director Kevin Iega Jeff passed the baton to longtime DRDT educational director Nicole Clarke-Springer, and a new artistic team, all with long ties to the company, stepped into formation. In his new role as creative director, Jeff absorbed himself with the task of finding and founding a new institutional home for the company on the south side of Chicago and developing an initiative for interdisciplinary works....

Aris Messinis/Getty Images Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. • About the right-wing’s response to marriage equality? —Drew Hunt • About this street art that lives on rotating cement trucks? —Sue Kwong

The Enemy Kitchen food truck has an erratic and unpredictable schedule. Most of the time it sits on the plaza outside the Museum of Contemporary Art, which is currently showing “Backstroke of the West,” a midcareer survey of the work of the food truck’s proprietor, the artist Michael Rakowitz. (Do not call it a retrospective. “A retrospective,” says Rakowitz, “is a living funeral.”) Inside the gallery, a plaque briefly tells the story of Enemy Kitchen‘s history and mission, and describes the truck itself as an “installation....

Brooklyn duo Xeno & Oaklander (aka Sean McBride and Liz Wendelbo) have been blending electronic experimentation with pop music for five full-length albums and more than a decade, layering strange synths with hushed, hook-driven vocals. McBride and Wendelbo have pushed their sonic minimalism in many directions, including stark cinematic soundscapes and heady drones, but on the brand-new Hypno (their first album for Dais), they try shaking off their fascination with challenging sounds to take a stab at straightforward dance pop....

In pre-COVID-19 Chicago, Grant Park, for many, served as a vibrant platform for cultural and political expression. Perhaps less known is the park’s history in America’s effort to promote national participation in World War I. The image here is of Grant Park transformed to host the traveling Great War Exposition from September 2-15, 1918. Created by the federal government’s Committee on Public Information (CPI), and overseen by the State Council of Defense of Illinois, the exposition was part of a larger effort to sell the war to the American public....

A few years ago, Chloe Wang was just another young actor in Los Angeles struggling to land substantial roles. “It wasn’t what I signed up for, but I’m so stoked it’s happening,” Bennet says. “I’m half Chinese, and we’ve got an ethnically diverse cast. To act alongside a melting pot of actors with a showrunner [Maurissa Tancharoen] who is Thai—it’s really cool to be on right side of history when it comes to diversity....