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....

Bobby Rush 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.

I don’t normally check in with Yelp in the course of writing a review (well, I never do), but after my meals at Andersonville’s new Mexican restaurant Cantina 1910 I couldn’t help but take a look at what the sheeple were saying. Whatever happened in the interim, she’s returned as a chef full of surprises and ready to upend expectations of what Mexican food has to be, with a keen sense of what works, and the superb raw materials to make it happen....

Frank Lloyd Wright fans rejoice: the master architect’s Emil Bach House opened in April as a luxury vacation rental and event space. On a recent guided tour of the renovated property, a bit of Wright’s dark side emerged along the way.

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

The other day I sent a friend an e-mail letting him know I couldn’t go to his birthday party because our grandson was turning one in Michigan. When I told my wife I’d spotted the conflict and dealt with it she pointed out that the birthday party is at the end of September and our grandson was born a year ago this past Sunday. Even if 75 is the new 30, August isn’t the new September....

Upon exiting a press screening of Good Time, which opens in Chicago tomorrow, I was ready to recommend the film. The movie had shaken me, commanding my attention with a brilliant interplay of camerawork, editing, music, and performance. I had been under its spell as I watched it, and I left it in that heightened state that you achieve by engaging with worthwhile art. Before Pattinson can have sex with the girl, the man he’d believed was his brother wakes up, takes off the bandages, and reveals himself to be someone else....

Wednesday, August 29 AACM Generations8 PM, Elastic, 3429 W. Diversey, elasticarts.org, free, all-ages Alfonso Ponticelli & Swing Gitan9 PM, Green Mill, 4802 N. Broadway, 773-878-5552, greenmilljazz.com, free, 21+ Fareed Haque Band9 PM, Green Mill, 4802 N. Broadway, 773-878-5552, greenmilljazz.com, $15, 21+ Fareed Haque Band8 PM, Green Mill, 4802 N. Broadway, 773-878-5552, greenmilljazz.com, $15 Sunday, September 2 Afterfest jam sessions hosted by Ira Sullivan with Marc Berner, Stu Katz, Larry Gray, Brev Sullivan, and Kyle Swan9 PM, Jazz Showcase, 806 S....

Make something up on your resume, Olivia said. It’ll be fine, she said. And then you’ll have a job. “Tamarind! Good to see your smiling face.” “Maybe they can’t handle the heat?” “Good.” Ozzy winked. “I’d expect nothing less from my star employee.” “Don’t go in the basement.” “I’ll keep that in mind.”

The Docks of New York As Ben Sachs noted last week, the Music Box has officially begun a three-month retrospective of the films both starring actress Marlene Dietrich and directed by Josef von Sternberg. If that wasn’t exciting enough, each film—seven titles in total—will screen on 35-millimeter. Sachs is dead-on when he writes that “few directors have been as obsessed as von Sternberg by the properties of light and shadow—watching his work on celluloid is comparable to attending a painting exhibition....

ABC Olivia Pope is most forlorn when there’s no red wine in sight. Scandal flew below my radar for its first three seasons. When the show’s popularity really hit, I was all caught up in Breaking Bad and Mad Men and turned up my nose at any network drama like some pretentious jerk. To quiet the pleas of a fellow television lover, I finally gave it a chance and I was hooked....

I missed the 40th annual new plays festival at the Actors Theatre of Louisville last year—just like I missed the 39 before it. So I made time this spring for the 41st edition of what’s officially known as the Humana Festival of New American Plays. Louisville’s not that far away, after all, it’s never short of bourbon, and the event itself can boast some remarkable stats. For instance: three fest-produced plays have won Pulitzer Prizes (The Gin Game, Crimes of the Heart, and Dinner With Friends), while three more were finalists for it....

Ludwig offered a number of possible explanations, rejecting them one by one. It’s not that winters have been warmer, or that there’s been a sudden decrease in spending on social services, Ludwig explained. Indiana hasn’t gotten any closer to Chicago, so there’s no reason to suspect a sudden increase in the flow of illegal guns to the city. A decline in arrests? No, because while drug-related arrests have fallen, gun-related arrests haven’t....

My theory? The people who’ve known Tracy Letts longest know him the least. I mean those of us who remember the enfant-terrible days of Killer Joe and Bug, the former a rude jest about a murder-for-hire scheme gone very wrong, the latter a skin crawler about codependency gone very, very, very wrong. Together with his Oklahoma roots, the two plays conveyed an impression of Letts as a postpunk cowboy avant-gardist a la Sam Shepard—the sort you can picture getting into a bar fight over somethin’ bad somebody said about Rimbaud....

So much for vigorous public debate of a weighty issue! No one can say the proposed nuclear agreement hashed out between Iran, the U.S., and other nations escaped notice at home. Republicans insist the Iranians bamboozled us, a nuclear attack on Israel will follow in short order, the whole Middle East could wind up in ashes, and all President Obama cares about is his legacy as a peacemaker. Democrats say no deal at all would be a lot worse than this one....

Courtesy Slate House Productions Sicko Mobb 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.

As President Donald Trump came before the White House press corps last week to swear up and down that he hadn’t colluded with the Russians to sway the U.S. presidential election, I finished plowing through Rising Star, David Garrow’s massive new biography of Barack Obama. I have a different perspective. Yes, I know the book could have used a tighter edit, and chunks of it—especially the final chapter about the Obama White House years—could have been left out altogether....

Let’s dispense with this from the beginning: The Girl in the Spider’s Web, the fourth installment in the wildly popular Millennium series, shouldn’t exist. After submitting the first three books to his Swedish publisher, Stieg Larsson died unexpectedly of a heart attack in 2004. Logically, the series should have died with him. Lagercrantz’s writing does a respectable job of capturing Larsson’s intensity, and having last read a Millennium book about a year ago, I was hard-pressed to tell the difference in the author’s syntax....

In 2017, Chicago got a taste of Danielle Agami’s choreography when Nick Pupillo, artistic director of Visceral Dance Chicago, commissioned Pick a Chair in 2017 to music by composer and Wilco percussionist Glenn Kotche. This Friday, November 16, Agami returns with her own company, Ate9, to present Calling Glenn, her first collaboration with Kotche, on a shared bill with Visceral and Chicago stalwart Deeply Rooted Dance Theater as part of the Auditorium Theatre’s “Made in Chicago” 312 series....

The occasion of esteemed former pastry chef Sarah Jordan taking over Logan Square’s Johnny’s Grill prompted some justifiable sarcasm about whether a place serving $9 pancakes and cheeseburgers is a legitimate replacement for a greasy spoon that served its “community” by serving breakfast for under $4. We’ll see about that. For now it’s worth pointing out that traditional upscaling of the classic greasy spoon has been in effect for quite some time; cases in point include ersatz versions like Dove’s, Little Goat, and even Au Cheval, but also at even more low-budget, low-profile neighborhood spots like Danny’s Egghead Diner, where you can get a $3 cup of soup along with more specialized stuff like a $12 double turkey burger with provolone and cranberry jam....