Courtesy Rush Hour Concerts Rush Hour Concerts 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.

Alejandro Rose-Garcia emerged from the Austin music scene in 2011 as Shakey Graves, combining blues, folk, and indie rock—his performances were as bare-bones as his bedroom recordings, his soulful voice accompanied by nothing but an acoustic guitar and a suitcase modified to serve as a kick drum. (He put together a three-piece touring band around the time of his second album, the 2014 Dualtone release And the War Came.) But despite Rose-Garcia’s rootsy traditionalist streak, he’s often indicated in interviews that’s he’s not interested in limiting his palette when there’s so much more to explore....

White Dog 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. • White Dog, Sam Fuller’s late masterpiece.

Mindy Tucker Todd Barry This Chicago date is one in a run that’s being promoted as Todd Barry’s “Final Crowd Work Tour.” And for the veteran stand-up, successful “crowd work” requires a couple of key elements. One, a mike and his brain full of gloop—no prepared material, no jokes come onstage. Two, audience members in the first couple rows with whom he can shoot the breeze and banter. Of those, at least one should be a musician with a clever haircut, one should be a software engineer or, ahem, “gamer,” and one should be clad in a dumb and/or ironic T-shirt (worn specifically to impress the guest of honor)....

The first time Chicago Shakespeare Theater brought them to town, in 2011, Australia’s One Step at a Time Like This gave us En Route—a 90-minute theatrical walkabout that used personal tech (earphones, cell, an MP3 player) to lead audiences of one on a witty, revelatory excursion through downtown Chicago. The revelation wasn’t particular. Sure, participants discovered what might be called clues: messages in alleys, bits of clothing draped on chairs. But those finds didn’t advance a plot, disclose a secret, or trigger a crisis....

C.B. Lindsay Mucca Pazza Ten years ago more than a dozen Chicago musicians came together to form Mucca Pazza, an outfit with the size and sound of a marching band that performs with panache and fervor of a punk group. To celebrate a decade of keeping things strange Mucca Pazza will play an anniversary show at Lincoln Hall on Tuesday, October 28 Friday, October 31. The concert also serves as a release party for their fifth album, L....

Jean Michel Godflesh 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.

COURTESY CHICAGO ARCHITECTURE FOUNDATION Drinks + Design 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 Times of Northwest Indiana broke the news on Monday that Gary’s 89-year-old potato chip company Peerless Potato Chips is going under. If there’s one small consolation, viewing the rough video I shot at Peerless’s plant in 2008 is a hypnotic balm to the worries of the day, as tons of whole potatoes move slowly along the Rube Goldberg line from peeler to slicer to fryer to salter, dryer, and bag....

Once proclaimed “New York’s Loudest Band,” this Brooklyn-based trio has had a rough time of it since the recording Transfixiation, which was released in 2015. Front man Oliver Ackermann had cofounded the Death by Audio effects pedals company in a Williamsburg warehouse in 2002, and in 2007 the building evolved to include a co-op music venue of the same name. The band also made their home there, but in 2014 the building was taken over by Vice Media, and the tenants were evicted (the events were the subject of a 2016 documentary by Matthew Conboy)....

I hardly ever consult another critic’s review of a play before I’ve written my own, but when I noticed that Amelia Roper’s Zürich was enthusiastically received in its original production by a Brooklyn company called Colt Coeur, I just had to find out why. My experience of Steep Theatre’s current Chicago staging, directed by Brad DeFabo Akin, was anything but positive. I found it grim, tedious, reductive, contrived, pedantic, self-evident, and confrontational in petty ways....

Cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum is tightly connected to the legacy and sound of visionary composer and reedist Anthony Braxton—he studied under Braxton, has played under his leadership for decades, and serves as executive director of the Tri-Centric Arts Foundation, which administers Braxton’s prolific output. In his own music, though, Bynum has usually mapped his own path. He’s had a fruitful partnership with drummer Tomas Fujiwara, and he’s led an evolving number of medium-to-large ensembles, privileging strings in some and brass in others—such as the band on his most recent album, Enter the Plustet (Firehouse 12)....

When Carolyn Smith saw a for sale sign go up on her block one evening in the fall of 2011, it felt serendipitous. The now 68-year-old was anxiously looking for a new place to live. The landlord of her four-unit apartment building in the city’s Austin neighborhood was in foreclosure and had stopped paying the water bill. That month, she and the other tenants had finally scraped together the money themselves to prevent a shutoff and were planning to withhold rent until the landlord paid them back....

“Bring Your Own Body,” a showcase of historical documents and contemporary art at Columbia College’s Glass Curtain Gallery, aims to highlight self-identified transgender histories as opposed to narratives by those outside the transgender community. In this show, trans artists decide how their community is documented, and they do it through various mediums. The collaged titles within Vargas’s work were pulled from sources at the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, which also provided some of the historical photography of trans individuals presented toward the back of the exhibition, or near the beginning of the time line....

Rap music is such a protean form that no one bothers to come up with specific names for its different stylistic phases, unlike, say, indie rock with its thick catalog of microgenres. It just moves too fast. Mustard’s got two songs on the Hot 100 right now. The higher ranked of the two is “Show Me,” by Kid Ink, an unexceptional LA rapper with so little charisma that he’s outshined on the track by human charisma vacuum Chris Brown....

Elena Zapassky Homemade dark beer 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.

Gingerbread mothers know we will be consumed by our children. Bite by bite, we teach them gratitude. We teach them that treasures take time: homes, stories, relationships. We teach them to run. She is always ready to run. “I never mean to hurt you,” she says, her voice shaking. “Never.” Already useless, I break it off below the bitten ankle and hand it to her to devour in two impossible bites....

Black! In his unfortunately titled solo show, Michael Washington Brown performs monologues purporting to demonstrate the “distinct differences” and “very definite similarity between Black people from all walks of life.” Well, just four, and all men: a music-loving African-American, a brainy Londoner, a paternal Jamaican, and a generic African, all primarily concerned with local, national, and global disunity among black people. Their musings range from provocative (can a Britisher ever feel “black enough?...