As hard as it may be to never mind the glut of music festivals this weekend (West Fest, Ruido Fest, Square Roots Festival, etc), there are still shows happening with three-band bills. And one of them is headlined by local indie-pop fivesome Varsity, who just this last March dropped a self-titled full-length on Indianapolis’s Jurassic Pop, the followup to 2014’s Thanks for Nothing. The first track from that album to get passed around was also its most immediately catchy....

Dane Tidwell vanished August 13, which was his 40th birthday and also the day he and his roommate were evicted from their apartment on Magnolia Street. Fearing for his life, friends notified the police. Tidwell was the creator and operator of the gay website Opus Chicago, and Gerald Farinas, who edited the site for him, told DNAinfo that Tidwell “faced an intensifying sense of hopelessness.” On August 13 “everything came crashing down around me....

24hrs is waiting to receive plaudits like those collected by R&B-rap crossover acts Ty Dolla $ign—a frequent collaborator—and the also anonymously named Dvsn, if only because he’s as yet nowhere near as lyrically acute as the former or as spiritual as the latter. The Artist Formerly Known as Royce Rizzy is Atlanta to the bone, and his addiction to slick hooks and arrhythmic stutters no doubt shows off his firm reliance on the sonic tropes of the ATL (not to mention his mixtape partner, MadeInTYO, is also his brother)....

It’s tempting to envy Paul Salopek. While the rest of us were dealing with Donald Trump, he was walking across Central Asia. “I came to accept that this project, fragile as it is, provides readers at least one small outlet to a wider horizon,” Salopek wrote, “and maybe even empathy for The Other.” “I’ve never viewed my storytelling through a political prism,” he said. “The questions that confront, say, a Saudi fire healer or a Djiboutian shipping agent, or a Georgian mother, are what power my work....

Michael Gebert Paula Haney of Hoosier Mama Several of our favorite people in food in Chicago, who also have books out, will appear on the Printers Row Lit Fest’s Good Eating stage this weekend. Paula Haney of Hoosier Mama Pie Company will be doing a cooking demo at 10 AM on Saturday; Jacquy Pfeiffer, who just won a James Beard Award for The Art of French Pastry, will be on the same stage at 11; there will be a conference called Midwestern Writers on Food at 11:45 AM; Lidia Bastianich of Eataly will be there at 12:45 PM; Gale Gand of the new Spritz Burger (among many other things) appears at 1:45 PM; the lovely Ina Pinkney will do a cooking demo at 2:30 PM; and Andrew Zimmern of TV’s Bizarre Foods will be there Sunday at noon....

David Goldman/AP Photos Atlanta Hawks owner Bruce Levenson keeps getting what for from the media. Wednesday morning I posted a long comment on the Bleader about the indignation currently being lavished by sports pages on Bruce Levenson and the tandem of Ray Rice and Roger Goodell. Sportswriters—though not all—love to kvetch. They love to fret over behavior that in their view is morally amiss. Their view is none too reliable thanks to their steamed-up glasses....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Friday, June 16, 2017. Have a great weekend! Cook County will no longer prosecute some traffic offenses due to lack of resources The Cook County state’s attorney’s office will stop prosecuting some traffic offenses due to lack of resources and personnel. “The state’s attorney’s office will not prosecute people accused of driving on licenses that have been suspended or revoked for financial reasons—such as failure to pay child support, tolls or parking tickets,” the Tribune reports....

Sinister Visions Zombie Prom Looking for something to do today? Agenda‘s got you covered. For more on these events and others, check out the Reader‘s daily Agenda page.

So what came first for the 90s-era shoegaze band: the reunion tour or the new album? So easy . . . it’s the reunion tour. Because as My Bloody Valentine and Ride and, yes, Slowdive began working the festival circuit years back—closely followed by sold-out theater tours—they all became inclined to pile on the hype of the shoegaze rediscovery by kicking off even more dust and even more threadbare gloom from those effect-pedal boards....

Q: I’m a 24-year-old gay male with few resources and no “marketable” skills. I have made a lot of bad choices and now I struggle to make ends meet in a crappy dead-end job, living paycheck to paycheck in an expensive east-coast city. Recently, someone on Grindr offered me $3,000 to have sex with him. He is homely and nearly three times my age, but he seems kind and respectful. I could really use that money....

I tried to eat way more meat than is good for the body at Tête Charcuterie, but for days afterward all I could think about was a salad. At the moment Tête only has a few of its own cured sausages available—either a la carte (in one-ounce or one-and-a-half ounce portions) or arrayed on charcuterie boards featuring an ever-rotating assortment that includes the various pâtés and terrines made in-house. The cured sausages are on display in a glass case behind the bar that runs perpendicular to the open kitchen, and in a glass-enclosed annex housing a meat grinder and sausage stuffer....

If Willie Nelson is approaching death, he sure isn’t acting the way you’d expect someone to behave when afterlife is imminent. At 84 years old, he’s still releasing an album a year (sometimes two, as he did in 2016 with the tribute LPs Summertime and For the Good Times), smoking a ton of weed (while becoming something of a marijuana entrepreneur with his own strain, Willie’s Reserve), and running both a truck stop (Willie’s Place, in Carl’s Corner, Texas) and the best Sirius XM country-music station (the phenomenal Willie’s Roadhouse)....

File photo/City of Evanston Next’s longtime home, Noyes Cultural Center The city of Evanston, Next Theatre’s landlord for more than three decades at the Noyes Cultural Arts Center, is planning to boot the company after one more season for failure to pay its rent. “A lack of communication” and some data-entry errors in accounting, Andalman said in a phone interview this week. On Monday night, Evanston’s Human Services Committee unanimously, but unhappily, voted to send those recommendations on to the city council....

Ashlee Benes Tuesdays on the Terrace Looking for something to do today? Agenda‘s got you covered. For more on these events and others, check out the Reader‘s daily Agenda page.

Far be it for me to give advice to the Republican Party, whose candidates I’ve not voted for since my Disco-dancing days back in the late `70s. Not only did the Democrats sweep every statewide race—from governor to treasurer—by landslide like margins. But they bounced Peter Roskam and Randy Hultgren, two Trump rubber stampers, from their congressional seats. And they picked up seats in the state senate and state house—so Speaker Madigan will have even more power than he had before the election....

The New Year began in much the same horrifying way the old one unfolded—with stories of murder splashed across the pages of our papers. I realize the economic gap between haves and have-nots isn’t the only reason for the incomprehensible violence, most of which is concentrated in, as Mitchell notes, several impoverished, largely black south- and west-side communities. “We must invest in these communities to eradicate poverty,” added state senator Kwame Raoul, “and in eradicating poverty, we will eradicate violence....

In a divey bar in Williamsburg, 24-year-old Chicago vocalist James King, aka the GTW (“Greater Than Wealth”), folds himself carefully into a booth across from me. He looks exhausted—he’s on a whirlwind tour of New York, hoping for a break—and he’s already regretting the effect that the $5 fries he ordered for lunch will have on his budget for the trip. Two nights ago he played to a small but enthusiastic crowd at the Glasslands Gallery, a nearby launching pad for up-and-coming underground talent....

Michael Gebert Henry Adaniya (right) at the Aviary, with Acadia chef Ryan McCaskey Grant Achatz’s time at Trio, from 2001 to 2004, is the subject of Next’s latest menu, but if Achatz got his start as a head chef there, Trio didn’t start with Achatz by a long shot. The Evanston restaurant was already ranked among the most creative and innovative fine dining restaurants in the Chicago area—along with Charlie Trotter’s, Ambria, Cafe Provencal, Carlos, and others of its day—and the job Achatz got was open because it had just lost Shawn McClain (Spring, Green Zebra), who’d replaced Rick Tramonto and Gale Gand when they left to start Tru....

The opening of Grant Achatz and Nick Kokonas’s fourth restaurant, Roister, a long-awaited first foray into something other than fine dining, has already been pushed back a few times. Now, because of construction delays, Achatz says the launch is scheduled for sometime around Thanksgiving. Plans for the space, the former Ing, at 951 W. Fulton (adjacent to Next), will include a la carte open-hearth cooking, though the style of food—described by the chef as “rustic but refined”—is as yet unknown....

In the aughts, it was possible to observe the past and future of U.S. public housing policy on the same Chicago block. After decades of deferred maintenance, lawsuits, and even a federal takeover, the portfolio of properties owned and operated by the Chicago Housing Authority was undergoing the nation’s largest public housing rehabilitation, demolition, and reconstruction project. Backed by more than a billion dollars as part of the Hope VI plan—a major federal initiative to overhaul the nation’s public housing—the authority launched the Plan for Transformation in 2000 to “renew the physical structure of CHA properties,” “promote self-sufficiency for public housing residents,” and “reform administration of the CHA....