Chicagoans is a first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. This week’s Chicagoan is Al Borcover, Travelers Aid volunteer at O’Hare. “On a slow day we’ll handle maybe 200 people, and on a busy day 300. We get ‘Where’s my gate?’ a lot. Sometimes they’re looking for Terminal 4, and there is no Terminal 4 at O’Hare. A lot of people are just looking for an outlet to recharge their cell phones....

The most obvious indication that there’s a taproom inside the Plant is that the P on the Peer sign atop the former Peer Foods meatpacking plant in Back of the Yards has been flipped to spell “beer.” Though Whiner Beer has been brewing inside the massive building since fall 2015, it still looks like an unlikely spot to have a drink, much less a tasting flight of craft beer. But walk in the front door and up a long ramp, and chalkboard signs direct you toward a spacious room filled with Edison bulbs, massive concrete columns, and wood tables with built-in planters....

Do film directors really walk around peering at the world through the frame of their joined hands? They do it often enough in the movies—but that’s where it counts, because the rectangle of fingers resides inside the larger frame of the film itself, turning the character into a camera and his experience into a movie within the movie. The final shot of Paolo Sorrentino’s commanding philosophical drama Youth shows an elderly filmmaker making a viewfinder with his hands in just this fashion, and it’s appropriate to a film that, while dwelling primarily on the discontents of old age, also considers the creative problems of movie people and, more specifically, the friction between their work and their own sense of self....

Luke Fontana James Adomian 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.

To date, most of director Robert Greene’s films have been self-reflexive documentaries about the creation of performances. Fake It So Real (2011) looked at a group of amateur wrestlers in North Carolina as they worked on a WWE-style stage show; Actress (2014) profiled stage and TV performer Brandy Burre; and Kate Plays Christine (2016) followed actress Kate Lyn Sheil as she learned about the late TV news anchor Christine Chubbuck in order to play her in an imaginary film....

If I’m talking to the right people, I can score some “I was there” points by bringing up the time in grad school—probably 1995 or early ’96—when I saw Bikini Kill at a roller rink in Springfield, Oregon. The bands played in one corner of the rink, and to get out there and watch them you had to put on skates. (Kathleen Hanna wore hers for Bikini Kill’s entire set.) Lots of people skated laps the whole time, so that they could only see the band when they were headed in the right direction....

Stromboli Each Friday, we recommend seven Old Movies to Watch Now, all of which come recommended by one of our critics and can currently be screened online. Read the review, watch the movie, feel accomplished. • The Private Life of Henry VIII, starring the great Charles Laughton.

A new study published by the Chicago Area Fair Housing Alliance claims that “aldermanic prerogative”—a customary practice that isn’t articulated anywhere in city law—is being used to reinforce the boundaries of Chicago’s historically segregated communities. Local zoning committees created by aldermen and made up of homeowners in the ward can also limit and revise proposed plans for affordable housing, forcing developers to invest in new architectural plans and zoning requests. The study argues that aldermanic control over zoning policy has resulted in the disproportionate use of downzoning in predominantly white wards, citing that 55% of all downzonings since 1970 have happened in 14 majority-white wards....

Buzzed Broadway The best improvisers keep it simple and make it look easy. The folks behind Buzzed Broadway try too hard and make improv look impossible. It’s challenging enough to create a fully improvised parody of a Broadway musical, but this Laugh Out Loud show junks it up with an additional gimmick, a drinking game that invites audience members to lift a glass every time a performer says a particular line or does a particular dance move....

If you wanted to know whether Barack Obama’s Presidential Center is going to look more like the sore thumb of the University of Chicago’s Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, or the nearly invisible bunker of Philadelphia’s Barnes Art Museum, last night’s meet and greet with the architects at the DuSable Museum wasn’t any help. Tsien said she screamed with excitement when they got the call awarding them this project, which she regards as the pinnacle of their careers....

Near the end of Cap’n Jazz’s riotous Riot Fest performance, frontman Tim Kinsella snuck a glance at the massive video board above the stage to glimpse a supersized black-and-white version of himself. Covered in sweat, his shirt half ripped off, he was holding a tambourine aloft in one hand and a microphone in the other while crowd surfing. “I need to find a real job,” he cracked. Then he offered a dismissive rebuttal: “Pfft....

The festival wraps up with Paul Downs Colaizzo’s For Tomorrow, Please Prepare (Sun 7/27, 2 PM), about racial tensions at a Georgia high school after a class discussion of Huckleberry Finn, and Cocked by Sarah Gubbins (The Kid Thing), in which a lesbian couple is confronted with the issue of gun ownership (Sun 7/27, 6 PM).

Arktika Local sludgy instrumental-postmetal band Pelican have just posted a stream of their upcoming Arktika, a self-released live double LP due out on 8/26. The recording—expertly captured by the band’s sound engineer Matt Hannigan at a 2013 show in Russia and mixed in Chicago by guitarist Dallas Thomas—is an hour-long, head-first dive into the rumbling dynamics and wall-of-sound guitars that the band specialize in. The highlight of this excellent recording is the set’s finale, “Mammoth,” a cut off of Pelican’s debut self-titled EP, a groovy bruiser of a track that perfectly showcases the massively heavy riffage and hypnotic repetition that became the band’s hallmark over a decade ago....

Like most festivals with more than one stage, Pitchfork sometimes books two great acts to play overlapping sets, forcing fans to make a painful choice. Reader writers found quite a few of those conflicts on the fest’s schedule, and thought long and hard about who they’d go to see. These write-ups compare those decisions with the “winners” as determined by Pitchfork itself, via rounded averages of the ratings the site has given to each artist’s releases....

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

When British pop phenom Charli XCX announced the release of last month’s mixtape Number 1 Angel, she debuted three songs on BBC Radio 1—including “Lipgloss,” which features Chicagoan Elizabeth Harris, who raps as Cupcakke. Plenty of local MCs broke out nationally last year, but Cupcakke’s rise might have been the most anomalous—in part because she didn’t benefit perceptibly from Chance the Rapper’s gravitational pull. Her absurdly raunchy raps are likewise far afield from Chicago’s current strains of street rap, but Cupcakke has explained to the Fader that her “freaky records” share that subgenre’s drive to push things to extremes....

Julius Caesar 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.

The Helio Sequence, formed in 1999 by Brandon Summers and Benjamin Weikel, in Beaverton, Oregon, have spent the past two decades pushing the boundaries of indie-pop. The duo’s first handful of releases walk the line between digital and organic, their songs boiling over with layers of bubbly synth, bright guitars, and harsh static. They’re the type of records you can get lost in, like shoegaze rock for a new era. But starting with 2008’s Keep Your Eyes Ahead (Sub Pop), the Helio Sequence have given themselves more breathing room—while still surreal and challenging, the songs on that album rely more on melodic sophistication and structure than on heady ambience and unhinged volume....

Nine minutes into his State of the Union address, on January 8, 1964—50 years ago last week—Lyndon Johnson brought up a neglected topic. Harrington stressed in The Other America that the problem of poverty was compounded by growing economic segregation. “If the middle class never did like ugliness and poverty, it was at least aware of them,” he wrote. “‘Across the tracks’ was not a very long way to go. ....