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In January 2000, as the likes of Sunny Day Real Estate and the Get Up Kids led emo’s second wave, a group of five young adults from Lawrence, Kansas, calling themselves the Anniversary released a striking debut. Built around the dueling guitars and vocals of Josh Berwanger and Justin Roelofs and backed by the infectious Moog lines and high vocal harmonies of Adrianne Verhoeven, Designing a Nervous Breakdown (Vagrant) earned the quintet a cult following....

Over the span of four years, Sheal Patel converted his entire family of lifelong vegetarians into meat eaters. It was a present in fifth grade that solidified his destiny as a hardcore carnivore. “One of the best gifts I ever got as a child was a grill in the backyard,” he says. “That was my pathway to really discover meat, because my mom still wasn’t thrilled with raw meat in her own kitchen....

AP Photo/Timothy D. Easley And all the girlies say he’s got a pretty fly white guy (hanging on his wall). Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. • About the New York State attorney general’s investigation into labeling fraud in the herbal supplement industry? —John Dunlevy • About the portrait of a white guy in Bobby Jindal’s office? —Gwynedd Stuart

Music journalist Banning Eyre first heard about blind kamalé ngoni player Vieux Kanté on a visit to the Malian capital of Bamako in February 2005. After picking up on the buzz that surrounded the 31-year-old musician in town, he decided to meet him for an interview. Eyre spent an hour speaking with Kanté and listening to him give spontaneous performances. His instrument, the kamalé ngoni, was designed in the 1960s as a sort of secular version of the traditional donso ngoni, which is typically played only at ceremonial functions; it uses a harplike arrangement of strings similar to that of a kora, and Kanté had a customized 12-string version....

The cinematic world of video makers Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby is defined by live-action footage interspersed with rudimentary animations, simple musical compositions juxtaposed with pop hits, and narrated passages laced with existential wonder. The pair, who’ve been creating singularly playful yet somberly reflective experimental videos over the past 25 years, present “Amazements: Videos by Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby,” a program of their latest and past works, at the Block Museum of Art on Thursday, November 21....

Erika Sheffer’s The Fundamentals opens with a crafty one-two punch. As the house lights dim, stock images of happy, indulgent people splash across a sweeping off-white wall adorned with nondescript high-end sconces. “Happiness is a place,” a soothing disembodied voice intones. “Comfort is a destination.” It soon becomes clear this audiovisual presentation, heavy on marketing hyperbole and inspirational vagaries, is a pitch for the high-end Wellington Hotel Properties. But it isn’t designed to lure customers, but rather to convince hotel employees that fealty to corporate “fundamentals”—resourcefulness, professionalism, courtesy, etc, will imbue their work hours with fulfillment bordering on religious ecstasy....

This year, the Reader has curated a list of noteworthy lengthy stories (including some from our own archive) to get you to ruminate on the origins of Thanksgiving: the arrival of European colonizers on the shores of a land already rich with history and culture. If at some point you’re sick of talking to your family about the election—or sick of talking, period—follow us on this nonfiction-narrative journey. For those trying to just focus on sports over the holiday, check out the Hoop Dreams-like story of a Wyoming high school basketball team, or this long read about football legend Jim Thorpe’s family’s long struggle to lay his body to rest....

Les Rita Mitsouko was huge in their native France, but maybe you’ve never heard of them? In 1990, the Reader’s Jonathan Rosenbaum singled out their fun music video for their 1986 song “C’est Comme Ça” in review of an otherwise comme ci comme ça-sounding music video screening series showing then at the Film Center (which we now know as the Siskel Film Center). Anyhow, I love both the song and the video: Check out this photo essay from a bicycle-led ride for justice through the South Chicago neighborhood and the southeast side....

Moor Mother and Roscoe Mitchell met in 2017 when they played back-to-back at Skaņu Mežs, an experimental music festival in Riga, Latvia. Mitchell, who plays a vast assortment of woodwind and percussion instruments, got his start in the mid-60s as an early member of visionary Black arts organization the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. By the end of the decade, he’d cofounded the Art Ensemble of Chicago and established himself as a solo artist; he improvises and composes music that encompasses jazz, classical, and experimental approaches....

At the start of COVID-19 lockdowns, thousands of Chicago theater artists lost immediate income. In the weeks to come, even more lost future gigs. And now, with no reopening date in sight, many of those artists are still without work. Before the state went into lockdown on March 22, the organizers behind the Chicago Artists Relief Fund were already set to help their community. The other organizers working on CARF are Elizabeth Blondel, Anjal Chande, Hal Cosentino, Adelina Feldman-Schultz, Cruz Gonzalez-Cadel, Lindsay Hopkins, and Michael McCracken....

Last month, DePaul University hosted its annual game development showcase at the Richard M. and Maggie C. Daley Building on its downtown campus. For the 55 students set to graduate from the university’s game development program this year, the showcase was the culmination of their schooling, a chance to share their work with their friends, family, and even potential employers. One of the first games I played was Captain’s Hold, a space-swinging adventure with an 80s neon flair....

Ours is a golden age of serial-killer entertainment. Anyone with a healthy victim list has books, docuseries, T-shirts, video games, and untold tchotchkes produced to burnish their legend. Stuck at home, we gorge ourselves on fact-based horror. Now the Peacock Network has brought back the granddaddy of self-aggrandizing murderers, the pride of Chicagoland, John Wayne Gacy, for Devil in Disguise, a six-part series that promises new revelations but mostly reinforces what has long been known....

When it comes to Halloween, I think about acts and feelings of fear, horror, disguise, deceit, physical safety—general discomfort women face all year round from external elements they do not have any control over. The way [we/women] experience pain is multifaceted. One of the best ways to overcome these discomforts is by recognizing themes, and creating something magical and ridiculous with them. It’s fun indulging in crazy in spite of being inspired by very tangible emotions and scenarios....

High Maintenance The Good Place Amy Sherman-Palladino has retaken the reins of the beloved mother-daughter dramedy she created. It’s hard to imagine how four 90-minute episodes will begin to fill in the nine-year gap since the show went off the air—but if anyone can do it, Sherman-Palladino can. The highly anticipated miniseries revival also offers fans a chance to forget the show’s dull, rushed final season. Premieres Fri 11/25 on Netflix

In a 2020 filled with unwanted surprises, one bright spot was the unexpected reunion of experimental metal group Genghis Tron after a self-described “indefinite” hiatus. Dream Weapon, the New York-based band’s first album in 13 years, departs from the sound of their earlier records in a way that may startle the group’s patient fans, but it’s worth the wait. Despite their punny name, during their brief tenure in the mid- to late 2000s Genghis Tron had a reputation for electro-metal brutality....

UPDATE Friday, March 13: this event has been canceled. Refunds available at point of purchase. It is hard not to have low expectations for yet another revival of Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey’s 1971 parody of/homage to late 1950s working-class youth culture and pre-Beatles American rock and roll. The show, a staple of community theaters and high school drama clubs, is packed with memorable mid-century American teen stereotypes (the bad girl, the greaser boy, the Sandra Dee wannabe) and lots of Top 40 radio knockoffs (“Summer Nights,” “Greased Lightning,” “We Go Together”) that get stuck in your head after even lackluster productions (or a third, or fifth, or tenth viewing of the blockbuster 1978 John Travolta-Olivia Newton-John vehicle)....

Courtesy of Aloha Got Soul Aloha Got Soul founder Roger Bong Because I’ve worked in music media for more than a decade, I’ve seen so many reissue labels it’d make your ass hurt—and few types of music seem to inspire reissues like soul and funk. What I haven’t seen, though, is a reissue label devoted exclusively to soul and funk from Hawaii. In fact I doubt I could’ve done much more than guess if you’d asked me to describe the differences between soul and funk from Hawaii and soul and funk from the mainland....

By now, most of us are aware of the disproportionate impact COVID-19 has on communities of color, particularly those on the south and west sides of Chicago. But what’s less publicly available—or even tracked at all—is how coronavirus is affecting people based on their gender, gender identity, and sexual orientation. Advocates say not having adequate data hides the dangerous impact of COVID-19 on the most vulnerable, including women, those who identify as nonbinary, trans, or gender nonconforming, and others in the LGBTQ+ community....

After being challenged by Sammy Faze of the Drinkingbird and Billy Sunday to make a cocktail using grass, Brett Lichnerowicz of Luxbar did some urban foraging in people’s yards “with or without their permission” to find some for his experiments. “There’s so many varieties of grass—there’s ryegrass, fescue grass, sweetgrass, bluegrass.” Once he’d retrieved some samples, he says, “I steeped, I cooked, I pulverized, I muddled, I chewed. They all kind of taste like a green tea....

There’s been jazz in Chicago for nearly as long as there’s been jazz. While jazz is commonly said to have ridden the rails to Chicago around 1916, when the Great Migration of African Americans from the south to the north kicked into gear, Dixieland bandleader Wilbur Sweatman had played gigs on the city’s south side as early as 1908, and Jelly Roll Morton first landed here in 1914. So while it’s undeniably a shame that the citywide festivities called Chicago in Tune, originally scheduled for spring 2020, have been diminished and delayed, the resilience and longevity of Chicago jazz ensure that the music will swing right out of the pandemic....