Even if you don’t have tickets to see Phil Collins—the King of Prog-Pop himself—at United Center on Monday night, you can still get your fix of all things heady, techy, and whimsical this week in Chicago. Progtoberfest IV is a massive three-day celebration of prog rock old and new that spans both stages at Reggie’s. In 2018, progressive rock is a superniche genre, and this fest brings some of its most impressive names to the forefront, including Pat Metheny drummer Paul Wertico, former Spock’s Beard members Neal Morse and Nick D’Virgilio (performing separately with their own ensembles), and sci-fi-influenced Canadian band FM....

Some years ago some friends used a credit card to pay the check after an epic feast at San Soo Gab San, the 26-year-old late-night north-side granddaddy of live-coal Korean barbecue. As they made their way to the door toward the perpetually packed parking lot beyond, they were chased down by their server, one of the stoic ajummas who haul around the banchan and scissor the sizzling galbi for endless hordes of soju-soaked carousers....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Tuesday, March 28, 2017. An ICE agent shot and wounded a man while serving an arrest warrant A man was shot and wounded by a U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agent in the Belmont Cragin neighborhood Monday morning. The ICE agent was serving an arrest warrant at a home when the father of the man named in the warrant allegedly pointed a gun at agents....

Ivory Tower This week brings our annual Best of Chicago issue, including ten film-related critics’ picks by me, Ben Sachs, and Drew Hunt; and our readers’ poll, in which Music Box always seems to win Best Art House Venue, Best Commercial Venue, Best Large Venue, Best Small Venue, and Best Chicago Venue Ever, Fuck You for Even Thinking About Another Venue, Motherfucker. Talk about your loyal patrons.

We’ve got capsule reviews of: Youth, Paolo Sorrentino’s first feature since his Oscar-winning The Great Beauty; The Big Short, adapted from Michael Lewis’s best seller about the subprime mortgage meltdown; The Danish Girl, starring Eddie Redmayne as the first man to undergo sex reassignment surgery; Don Verdean, a new comedy from Napoleon Dynamite director Jared Hess; Gabo: The Creation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a documentary about the revered Colombian novelist; In the Heart of the Sea, Ron Howard’s whaling epic about the true story behind Moby-Dick; The Keeping Room, a drama about three southern women menaced by Union scouts in the last days of the confederacy; Macbeth, starring Michael Fassbender, Marion Cotillard, and David Thewlis; Paradise Is There, a “video memoir” by singer Natalie Merchant; Stinking Heaven, a black comedy set at a sober-living commune in Passaic, New Jersey; and Theeb, billed as the first “Bedouin western....

Here’s the deal: Do not put plastic bags, food, wood, clothing, cords, hoses, propane tanks, or construction waste into your recycling cart. And this warning goes out to my neighbors: Don’t put cat litter in there either! After seeing DNAInfo’s story on the new stickers rolled out to enforce the city’s change in January 2016 from bagged to bagless recycling, and the detailed list of the stuff that, it turns out, can’t be recycled (paper coffee cups?...

A first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. “If you couldn’t get quarters to people years ago, you’d be out of business, like if your changers broke. Now a lot of our money comes from credit cards. And the big thing in the industry is to wash cars better and faster—charge less, but wash a larger volume of cars.

Courtesy Getty Images Partake in brown liquor during International Whisk(e)y Day 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.

UPDATE: DNAinfo reports that family and a friend have been assured that Tidwell is safe. Farinas told DNAinfo that Tidwell in recent days had “faced an intensifying sense of hopelessness.” Farinas said friends “believe that Dane is a threat to himself and needs help. We are fearful for his life.” Police were notified. My introduction to Tidwell came four years ago, when I reported the bleak end of the once thriving bar rag Gay Chicago....

At the Table If there’s one thing that’s rarely in short supply at storefront theater, it’s new plays that follow the Big Chill template: classmates and old buds reunite in adulthood for drinks, memories, arguments, and unexpected self-examination. Michael Perlman’s 2015 script, about friends who surrender their smartphones at the door of a vacation home during two separate weekends, largely follows that tried-and-true format. But Broken Nose Theatre’s version, retooled by Perlman and director Spenser Davis, reflects changes in casual conversations since the 2016 presidential race and election....

Even before the Women’s March last Saturday was history, the archivists at the Newberry Library suspected it would be historic. They put out a call for Chicagoans to send in photos and bring their signs, their buttons, their pussyhats, and whatever other materials they carried with them to the library to be preserved forever in its archive. The library began putting out calls for materials on social media on Friday; the response was immediate and overwhelming....

Adapted in 1987 by Stephen Mallatratt from Susan Hill’s 1983 novel about a man literally haunted by the titular vengeful evil spirit, this play has been running continuously in London’s West End since 1989, and it is easy to see why. The story is engaging, packed with interesting, eccentric English characters, and contains enough jump scares to keep an audience on the edge of its seat. Mallatratt actually tells two stories at once in his adaptation: one about the attempt to turn a man’s recollections of a traumatic event into a theater piece, and the other about the traumatic memory itself....

ARTIST: Sarah Squirm SHOW: Guerilla Toss, Good Willsmith, Sarah Squirm, and DJ B-Trip at Hideout on Sat 9/22 MORE INFO: sarahsquirm.tumblr.com

“You fuckin’ amateur.” —Thomas Vaccaro, Danny’s brother, in Danny Casolaro Died for You Casolaro’s investigations led him to a nest of miscreants and misfits reminiscent of the Watergate plumbers or the free-Cuba types depicted in Oliver Stone’s movie JFK. One of them was Mike Riconosciuto, portrayed here (by an endlessly entertaining Mark Richard) as a sort of street-smart version of Bobby Fischer, existing in a constant state of nerdish exasperation. Riconosciuto, aka Danger Man, apparently got the conspiratorial ball rolling, telling Casolaro that he was one of two Republican operatives sent to Iran to bribe the ayatollahs into holding on to their American hostages until after the 1980 presidential election, so as to deny Jimmy Carter the “October surprise” he needed to beat Reagan....

‘Tis the season for hip-hop and waffles—or at least it is at Jerry’s in Wicker Park. Next week the restaurant, bar, and venue hosts two events with the city’s preeminent breakfast-food-­obsessed rap squad, Waffle Gang! On Saturday, December 19, Waffle Gang leader Shawn Childress (aka rapper, singer, and producer Awdazcate) celebrates his 40th birthday as part of the weekly rap-­karaoke party at Jerry’s (with music by Encyclopedia Brown). It’s Native Tongues night, so come ready to bust out some Jungle Brothers, De La Soul, or A Tribe Called Quest; the fun starts at 9 PM, and there’s no cover....

Michael Gebert Fettucini made with grano arso, burnt flour. “This is something you’d only have seen in Puglia,” chef John Coletta of Quartino, the two-story Italian restaurant in River North, says. “Even in Lazio, you wouldn’t see it.” “In my opinion, its place is pasta. It started that way; why not keep it that way?” Coletta says. “People used to flavor pasta doughs, whether it was lemon or pepper or whatever the flavoring is....

Combatants in the great charter school debate went toe-to-toe a couple of weeks ago in a bout that should have been broadcast live on TV. Not that there’s any doubt about what the board is going to decide, regardless of the feedback it gets. But the creation of the advisory council was overseen by New Schools for Chicago—a nonprofit consortium featuring some of the city’s wealthiest charter school backers. And the facilitator of the council itself was Juan Jose Gonzalez, the Chicago director of Stand for Children, another consortium of wealthy charter school backers....

Lancashire, England, c. 1580: Two men sip wine in a stone-walled room whose dark and dampness are relieved only by a weak wood fire. One man, the elder, is a priest, a believer—in God, in the church, in a “harmony” worth pursuing. The younger man is an artist, or will be. He can’t hear the harmony; his head roils with a multitude of voices and characters clamoring to be heard and understood....

A weak sentence can undermine a strong argument. The other day I read Steve Chapman’s libertarian case for legalized prostitution. Then I read a moral case against it, made by Sarah Marshall in the New Republic. I won’t say one writer was right and the other wrong; they frame the question differently and reach different conclusions, and it is up to you to frame the question for yourself the way you want to....

Texas has just made itself look a little silly. In discussing “immigration” to America, a new geography textbook for use in Texas schools teaches that “The Atlantic Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.” As the Dallas News observes in this editorial, the state’s textbooks are carefully scrutinized and heatedly debated, with an eye to making southern history as anodyne as possible....