ABC Looking for love in specifically one wrong place. According to voice-over narration provided by a character named Bruce, ABC’s new sitcom Mixology is “the story of ten strangers, one night, and all of the stupid, embarrassing things we do to find love.” I watched the premiere episode, and if I had that narrator gig, I think I would have said something more like: “Mixology is like being condemned to purgatory if purgatory were a bar filled with unlikable people....

They call Fillet of Solo a festival, but it’s more like an annual gathering of the tribes. Thirteen Chicago storytelling “collectives” are set to convene this month to celebrate the art and craft of performing personal histories. Produced by Lifeline Theatre, the fest’s 17th incarnation also features ten independent performers. The whole thing unfolds over three weekends at the Lifeline and Heartland Studio spaces, located about a block from each other in east Rogers Park....

The Awful Truth This week Chicago moviegoers have the opportunity to see not one but two films featuring the one and only Cary Grant: the famous George Cukor comedy The Philadelphia Story (1940) and the lesser-known Merrily We Go to Hell (1932), which screens as part of Chicago Filmmakers’ “Dyke Delicious” screening series. The film, in which Grant has a small role, is a pre-Code gem about the rigors of monogamy directed by Dorothy Arzner, a seminal if underappreciated filmmaker notable for being the only female Hollywood director of her era....

There won’t be anything “white” about Christmas in Chicago this year. Instead the unseasonable warmth gave way to rain and turbulent wind—something of an appropriate symbol for what 2015 has meant to black communities across the country. These leaders, organizers, and activists in the streets aren’t looking for a quick fix. Instead, they’re fighting for a gift that will keep on giving—for families who lost loved ones to police brutality, for scores of people whose lives could be spared with substantive reforms, and for city budgets rocked by hundreds of millions of dollars in police misconduct payouts....

You could say Students for a Democratic Society was all about inclusion. In 1969, with the Weather Underground in control and the Vietnam war in full swing, it supported an anti-capitalist revolution, carried out by colonized and oppressed people everywhere in alliance with what we’d now call woke Western white folks. (Violent woke Western white folks, as it happened: “Bring the war home” was an invitation to tear up “Pig City” [i....

As portrayed in the biopic Yona, poet Yona Wallach was a literary rock star—extroverted, openly bisexual, and prone to public feuds with her contemporaries. She was also mentally ill, and at certain points in her life she was institutionalized; during at least one stay she served as a guinea pig for psychological experiments involving LSD. Yona, which screens at this year’s Chicago Festival of Israeli Cinema, dramatizes her life from the mid-60s to the mid-70s (she died of breast cancer in 1985, at age 41)....

The author Nearly a decade ago, I ran into former Reader editor Kiki Yablon at a cookout thrown by former Reader contributor Liz Armstrong that I’d gone to in part because I couldn’t afford to feed myself that day. Kiki took pity on me and told me to come down to the office to take the proofreader test. I must have failed spectacularly, since I’d never really proofread anything before and no one ever told me my score....

Michael Kuseske Chicago Botanic Garden Art Festival 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.

Mathew Gregory Hollis American Me 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.

Between the release of their 2010 album Skit I Allt and the 2015 gem Allas Sak, excellent Swedish psych band Dungen were enlisted to create an original soundtrack for German director Lotte Reiniger’s 1926 animated feature film The Adventures of Prince Achmed, one of the medium’s earliest examples and widely considered to be its oldest surviving work. Dungen’s music is distinguished in part by the sweet nasal singing of front man Gustav Ejstes, whose indelible melodies weave together the group’s often discursive styles....

Speaking of bar food, ever since Lakeview’s Long Room opened its kitchen, Sidecar, this summer, I’ve been wondering if slinger consumption has taken a hit across the street at the Diner Grill. Late night the little window to the side of the barroom has been manned by chefs Kyle Schrage and Jim Torres, calling themselves Beard & Belly. They’re putting out exactly the sort of cheesy, palliative drunk food you head for when you leave a bar, and it’s good enough that people might just stay put instead of heading across Irving Park Road to get fixed: pickled eggs, burgers, fries, chili-cheese fries, poutine, and something called a poutinewich....

Makavejev’s The Coca-Cola Kid screens at the Logan Center for the Arts on Friday at 7 PM. At the University of Chicago’s website, a countdown has already begun for Let’s Get Working, a three-day celebration of Studs Terkel that will take place in early May. The festival is to feature readings, film screenings, musical performances, and community dialogues—an appropriately diverse tribute to a man who “recognized the value in listening to all of the city’s voices....

James Broughton’s The Pleasure Garden I find it telling that Big Joy, a fairly straightforward documentary about the poet and experimental filmmaker James Broughton, is currently playing at Facets Multimedia in a weeklong run while most genuine experimental films are lucky to play Chicago more than once. That’s not Big Joy‘s fault: the movie does a commendable job of explaining why Broughton’s art is important, elucidating his perennial themes and the cultural contexts in which he worked....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Thursday, September 7, 2017. Sandi Jackson subpoenas Tamron Hall and strip club owner in increasingly bizarre divorce case Former alderman Sandi Jackson has subpoenaed a wide array of people in her ongoing divorce from former congressman Jesse Jackson Jr., from a strip club owner to former Today Show host Tamron Hall, according to the Sun-Times. Hall, restaurant hostess and model Giovana Huidobro, Jesse Jackson Sr....

WALTER ALBERTIN Nelson Algren 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.

For the past three months Natalie Chami, a Chicago high school teacher who’s been making music as TALsounds since 2011, has been fastidiously learning songs from her new album, Love Sick. If you think it seems backward to record first and learn the material later, you’re not wrong. Right from the beginning, Chami has improvised every TALsounds performance and recording, using digital looping technology to layer piano, synthesizer, and other electronics with her ethereal vocals....

A springtime mixologist mashup Friday, March 21 | 7-9:30 PM | Chop Shop | $45 PURCHASE TICKETS HERE Friday, March 21, 2014, Chop Shop, 2033 W. North, 7-9:30PM Get ready for the cocktail creativity dreamed up by the following lineup of mixologists—and get inspired by the mastery displayed in their past Cocktail Challenge: Nick Ostapczuk of Bangers & Lace (Watch Nick take a whip to the Ramos Gin Fizz )...

During the golden age of public-access television in the 1980s, a gloriously low-rent corner of the media world flourished. In the absence of expectations of network executives and their advertisers, individuality reigned, and all manner of oddball delights were waiting to be discovered by curious teens: fanatical televangelist preachers, talent-show hacks, prank-prone call-in shows, and programs broadcasting the unedited perspectives of a multitude of marginalized people—minorities, LGBTQ folks, atheists, clowns....

This week, stuff your face, laugh your face off, and admire one of Chicago’s most famous public art faces. Here’s what we recommend: Tue 8/8: Join CNN commentator Van Jones—a rare voice of reason on cable news—and his #LoveArmy at the Chicago Theatre (175 N. State) for We Rise, a tour highlighting the commonalities between Americans in the interest of sparking social dialogue. 8 PM, $39.50-$69.50 Thu 8/10: Are You Sleeping, the new book by Galesburg, Illinois, native Kathleen Barber, is a dark crime story about a woman whose family abandons her after the murder of her father....