If, like me, you’ve fallen under the spell of agave spirits, you know the tasting event Mexico in a Bottle is the party of the year. Graduating from its increasingly crowded original digs at the Chop Shop, the 2018 incarnation of the festival is moving into roomier quarters at the Logan Square Auditorium, all the better for one to easily glide among more than 100 bottles from mezcaleros both established and unsung, more than of their destilados new to Chicago....

School of Life is a good if not exact translation of L‘École Buissonnière, the original name of Nicolas Vanier’s latest family drama about embracing nature; the French title is an idiomatic expression that means playing truant or skipping school (or work) to revel outdoors. A novelist, environmentalist, and educator widely known overseas for travel books and documentaries about his expeditions to Siberia, Alaska, and the Yukon, Vanier returns to Sologne, the rural region of north-central France where he grew up....

Two Chicagoans are working to introduce the city’s next piece of public art: a series of interactive LED light tubes running under the el tracks above Wabash Avenue. courtesy Seth Unger and Jack Newell A rendering of the Wabash Lights “We felt like it was an area of the city that needed to be imbued with a little more energy—activated in a way that turned it into something people were proud of,” Unger says....

Put Ty Money’s recent Cinco De Money 3 mixtape on shuffle and right away you’ll find out what makes the Harvey rapper one of the most exciting voices to recently emerge in the local scene. Following 2016’s solid but inconsistent second installment in his Cinco De Money series, this release is taut and focused, and leaves lots of room for Money to make each beat his plaything. Without fail I return to “Intro,” which isn’t so much a great song as a platform that allows Money to display the depth of his skills in the amount of time it takes to microwave a burrito....

This year at Riot Fest, ten bands will play their most beloved albums all the way through. Doing my best to set aside nostalgia, I revisited several of these “classics” to see how they hold up today. Band: The OffspringAlbum: Smash (1994)Date, Set Time, Stage: Fri 9/12, 7:45 PM, Roots StageThe Verdict: When I was in elementary school, fuck-the-system lyrics such as “You stupid dumbshit goddamn motherfucker!” and “Kill! Fuck off!...

Alex Wong/Getty Images Justice Scalia may be waiting for another day to face off against Judge Richard Posner. Within the federal judiciary, it’s never supposed to get personal, but there are times I don’t believe it. One of those milestones was the ruling Sept. 4 by Judge Richard Posner, of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, who eviscerated the Indiana and Wisconsin cases in such strong language that even a revanchist blowhard like Justice Antonin Scalia would be reluctant to grapple with his white hot logic....

Getting around Chicago via mass transit can be frustrating for any of us, but imagine what it’s like for people who are legally blind. Visually impaired sound artist, rock musician, and recording engineer Andy Slater offered to share his experiences navigating the city on public transportation and floated some ideas to improve transportation access for folks with disabilities. “There’s a layer over my vision like snow from an old TV,” he says....

These days Jawbreaker are almost as unapproachable as they are influential. Unlike most (if not all) of the other big-name punk bands partaking of the great 21st-century reunion boom, this San Francisco trio seem to have retained some of the mystique that surrounded their original pre-Internet run. Jawbreaker’s sophisticated, gritty pop-punk has attracted a cult of fans whose worship of the band can be off-putting to outsiders—and there are a lot of outsiders....

Which shade of King Crimson can one expect to see tonight? The baroque-hippie, fast-shredding prog-rock of “21st Century Schizoid Man”? The show-offy protomath prog-rock of the band’s 1972-’74 peak? The global-fusion avant-AOR prog-rock of the group’s trio of albums in the early-to-mid 1980s? I have some bad news: You probably won’t get any of these. What you’re likely to witness is what “King Crimson” has been about since 1995’s THRAK—cheesy, technically impressive prog-rock that’s favored by Guitar Center employees and diehard fans....

Chicago police superintendent Garry McCarthy came ready Thursday night for the throng of protesters who, as they have for the past few months, packed the Chicago Police Board’s meeting to demand detective Dante Servin be fired. Still, that did not satisfy a litany of speakers who told Police Board members and McCarthy that a decision to dismiss Servin had dragged on long enough. Servin, who was off-duty at the time of the 2012 shooting, fired his gun over his shoulder while inside his car....

State rep Lou Lang remembers thinking the night of the election that people with a stake in Illinois’s medicinal marijuana pilot program—including cultivators, dispensaries, and patients—had a lot to fear from a Trump presidency and its promises of “law and order.” Spicer also assured the public that Trump “understands the pain and suffering that many people go through who are facing especially terminal diseases, and the comfort that some of these drugs, including medical marijuana, can bring to them....

Jose Martinez Jr. Oozing Wound 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.

Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago.

Trombonist Jacob Garchik has long been one of the more fascinating figures on New York’s improvised music scene, a terrific musician with a fertile imagination and unbridled curiosity. He’s become a trusted collaborator of the Kronos Quartet, creating dazzling arrangements of music from all around the world for the string quartet. For his 2012 recording The Heavens: The Atheist Gospel Trombone Album he contributed up to a dozen parts through overdubbing, creating a kind of one-man Brass Fantasy larded with rich counterpoint....

In 2007, when the contents of Vivian Maier’s storage lockers were sold off at a Portage Park auction house, Ron Slattery was one of three major winning bidders for boxes that turned out to contain the life’s work of a remarkable photographer. In April 2012, however, Slattery turned 56 of his Vivian Maier photographs over to John Corbett and Jim Dempsey’s much-loved Wicker Park gallery, Corbett vs. Dempsey, for an exhibit and sale that opened in June, ran through December 2012—and culminated in a lawsuit in which Slattery is seeking damages of more than $2 million....

The Night of the Hunter In this week’s paper, J.R. Jones recommends the new comedy Bad Words, the directorial debut of actor Jason Bateman (Arrested Development, Horrible Bosses). Of the film, Jones writes, “[I]t’s not much to look at, but at least [Bateman] has the nerve to push the insolence, profanity, and brutal insult humor to its absolute limits.” I haven’t seen the film, but such an evaluation seems fitting of not only Bad Words but most films directed by actors, which tend to focus on dialogue and performance more than visual and formal design....

BRIAN JACKSON/SUN-TIMES MEDIA Will the mayor (pictured here with Alderman Robert Maldonado) bow to the will of the people and order the Board of Education to reverse itself? If Chicago truly were a democracy, the members of the Board of Education would admit they had royally messed up and would reconvert Ames from a marine academy back to a regular neighborhood school. Here’s the deal . . . I’m not sure exactly why Maldonado hankered so passionately for a marine school....

Last week Slate posted a story whose headline pronounced classical music in America dead. Such obituaries have been written so often—and not just for classical music—that you could be forgiven for assuming that most art forms have more lives than a cat. But classical music, while definitely still alive, has without question lost the cultural weight and audience appeal it once had in this country—it’s now widely seen as stale, fussy, elitist, and boring....

During a trip to New York last summer, I finally made my first visit to the legendary Village Vanguard. The club was hosting a week of performances by a diverse slate of musicians tackling the latest book of compositions by John Zorn, the Bagatelles. I caught a set by pianist Craig Taborn that was every bit as brilliant as I expected, but a friend recommended I also check out another pianist I’d never heard of: Philadelphian Brian Marsella....

Yesterday numerous outlets reported that Dieter Moebius, the Swiss-born musician, died at the age of 71. His body of work spans virtually every conceivable iteration of late-20th-century experimental electronic music: noise and drone with Kluster (with Hans Joachim-Roedelius and Conrad Schnitzler), proto-dance music with Cluster (the same group sans Schnitzler), Krautrock with Harmonia (in which Cluster brought on Neu! multi-instrumentalist Michael Rother), ambient music with Brian Eno (as both Harmonia and Eno as well as Cluster & Eno), and a combination of all these kinds of music with his own solo material....