In the wake of a tumultuous presidential election, this year’s One-Minute Play Festival at the Den Theatre puts politics at center stage. In its seventh year, the festival—this edition is titled “America Is . . . “—features dozens of minute-long performances that comment on the state of both the country and the city of Chicago under the Trump administration. The One-Minute Play Festival travels all across the United States and makes an effort to include and highlight diverse perspectives....

Sun-Times Media Jackie Robinson West inspired Chicago, but the reason the team was playing was to win. For when the One Great Scorer comesTo mark against your name,He writes—not that you won or lost—But how you played the Game. —Grantland Rice But the kids didn’t make the trip to Williamsport to wrap a gift to give to Chicago. They went there to win baseball games. They won a lot of them, but one fewer than they hoped to....

Chicagoans is a first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. This week’s Chicagoan is Luis Muñoz, 56, birder and retired police officer. Montrose is the number one birding location in all of Illinois. That little piece of whatever, 15 to 20 acres, is number one in the whole state. It sticks out into Lake Michigan, so when the birds are migrating at night and the sun rises, first thing they see is Montrose Point, and they make a beeline to it....

One of the more welcome film series in town, Asian Pop-Up Cinema (now in its seventh season) presents recent work from east Asia that might not have reached this city otherwise. Case in point: this Wednesday at the River East 21 at 7 PM, it will present Smaller and Smaller Circles (2017), the latest feature by Filipino director Raya Martin, with the filmmaker scheduled to appear for a postshow discussion. Martin’s work has received much attention over the past 15 years—some of his films have played at Cannes, and he’s been the subject of retrospectives in New York and Paris—but his movies rarely play in Chicago....

Reeling: The Chicago LGBTQ+ International Film Festival opens Thursday with a screening of 4th Man Out at the Music Box and continues for another week at Landmark’s Century Centre. This year’s schedule includes anniversary screenings of Brokeback Mountain (2005) and I Am Love (2010); we’ve got reviews of these and five other features in our festival roundup. Also this week, Ben Sachs considers The Second Mother, a Brazilian comedy with more than a passing resemblance to Sebastian Silva’s Chilean hit The Maid....

According to the podcast and arbiter of celebrity minutiae Who? Weekly, famous people can typically be separated into the “thems” and the “whos”—the omnipresent ones you recognize and the obscure ones you probably don’t. In the current sphere of pop music, singer Dua Lipa undeniably qualifies as a “who.” She’s not ironic enough to ingratiate herself with the indie crowd like Marina & the Diamonds, and she’s not quite direct enough to suck in the soccer moms and dads....

Over the last few years Chicagoan Natalie Chami’s output has been prolific, both as a member of improvisational noise trio Goodwill Smith and as her solo project TALsounds. It was just in October that Hausu Mountain released Lifter + Lighter—the latter’s most focused, cohesive effort to date—but its follow-up, Love Sick (Ba Da Bing Records), is already primed to enter the world as a massive leap forward. Chami takes the synthy bliss-drone of Lifter + Lighter and piles on layers of organs and electronic ambience, building otherworldly and overwhelming cascades of sonic warmth....

Some people test the limits of our ability to think clearly about them. President Trump and his Washington playmates fit the description. But movie stars and the whole Hollywood scene will always be in the mix, and over the past week Hollywood took its turn. But that’s the moment when we see them actually pretending to be someone else. Actors acting no more pretend to be other people than Picasso, painting, pretended to be an old guitarist....

AMOS MARC Erin Markey 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.

Wayne Dabney/Wikimedia Commons Valerie June Singer and multi-instrumentalist Valerie June hails from Tennessee and isn’t afraid to sing about it. June’s fourth album, last year’s Pushin’ Against a Stone, is steeped in her Memphis roots, which are intricately woven into her earthy lyrics. This summer my roommate played a few songs off of June’s album while we hung out on our porch on a hazy evening, making for the perfect atmosphere to listen to these tunes....

Mick Dumke In January Lake Michigan looked like a tundra on another planet. Now it’s time to swim in it. As I waded into the water one morning last week, I was reminded that a lot can change in a short period of time. I’ve long since learned that when it’s crisp you’re better off plunging in quickly, before your feet convince you that they’re turning purple and numb. And it was crisp....

No one could argue that Car2go CEO Olivier Reppert didn’t have some skin in the game during the Chicago launch of the point-to-point car-sharing service this morning in Pioneer Court. He stood motionless in the downtown plaza in front of one of the company’s pint-size Smart cars while young people from the Jesse White Tumblers gymnastics crew bounced off a trampoline, soared through the air Superman-style, and somersaulted over the vehicle and his head....

Architecture Where does the Chicago Architecture Biennial go next? By Anjulie Rao Visual Art Ten best bets for fall visual arts By Tal Rosenberg Literature Eve Ewing explains it all By Aimee Levitt Ten best bets for fall lit Theater Redmoon’s Frank Maugeri is still going strong By Tony Adler Ten best bets for fall theater Dance Five best bets for fall dance By Irene Hsiao Comedy Kellye Howard regularly kills in Chicago, and this fall she’ll go national...

Year-end superlatives are a bogus endeavor. Unless you’ve seen every last one of the roughly 200-plus productions that graced Chicago stages in 2018, you can’t credibly decree which were the absolute best. And even if you did see every last show, comparing multimillion dollar musicals with cash-strapped off-Loop dramas is a ridiculous exercise in apples and oranges. The Golden Girls: The Lost Episodes, Volume 2, Hell in a Handbag Productions Let it stand as a testament to the kind of year this was, what sort of swill we had to wade through just to get out from under it, what kind of singleness of purpose it took just to let our hair down for one night and have fun even, that the show I recommended most to people in 2018 was a fake episode of The Golden Girls in an attic in Andersonville....

TLC Alan condescends to Kirlyam in the grocery store. Should you ever want to marry someone who’s a citizen of another country—but do it here on American soil where the wedding industrial complex can cater to your every whim—your betrothed will have to be approved for a K-1 visa or “fiance visa.” She then comes to the U.S., you guys tie the knot, she becomes a citizen, and you live happily ever after....

Michael valued his cashiering job at CVS as if he were an investment banker. His dream was to work at the national office, despite my insistence that I would rather be dead than live in Woonsocket-where-the-fuck-is-that, Rhode Island. Every night, he ironed his employee polo, then used my straightening iron around the collar for an added crispness. I sat cross-legged on our bed, watching him spray a fine, even mist of distilled water over the navy cotton, following it with the smooth, sweeping movement of the iron....

About a year ago Brent Cayson got the idea to launch a DJ series focused on emo, and he’s since made the Burlington the home for his (mostly) monthly Emo Night. On Thursday Cayson takes over the Burlington’s back room for a live show—an unofficial pre-Riot Fest party that he’s dubbed “Cool for One Night.” Three local emo bands will play, and first on the bill is a young act called Forfeit....

Steve Krakow is a one-man cultural industry. Under the alias Plastic Crimewave he leads a grimy psych-rock band that bears his name (the latest of many such groups), plays psychedelic banjo solos, and creates a hand-drawn Reader comic called the Secret History of Chicago Music about underappreciated local musicians. He also writes Galactic Zoo Dossier, an extremely intermittent but lavishly lettered periodical that celebrates mind-altering music from around the globe, some of which he’s released via his Galactic Zoo Disk label, an imprint of Drag City....

John Sturdy Owls 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.

Todd Rosenberg Chicago Dancing 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.