Gil Leora Windy City Rollers 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.

Riot Fest 2018 Friday

There are two overwhelmingly positive developments to this year’s Chicago International Film Festival. One is that the fest will present a program of experimental cinema for the first time in decades; that screens on Monday, October 15, at 8:30 PM and features short works by Apichatpong Weerasethakul and local filmmakers Melika Bass and Deborah Stratman. The second is that the festival will screen more features directed by women than ever before, most of them first- or second-time filmmakers....

Cheryl Lindo Jones via Flickr Not an alien invasion: the aurora borealis over Chicago in 2006. This has been a strange week here in Chicago. Boiling water turned to snow. (It also retained its ability to burn.) Steam rose from Lake Michigan and the Chicago River, at least in the parts where they weren’t frozen into modernist ice sculpture. If we still believed in signs and wonders, and that the world will end not in fire but in ice, a very good case could be made that this week is the beginning of end times....

Robert Altman was one of the greatest filmmakers America ever produced, a true maverick with a panoramic vision of the United States and sharp insights into the national character. His first big success, the antiwar comedy MAS*H (1970), introduced people to his signature style of large ensemble casts, overlapping dialogue, corrosive social satire, and sudden, startling moments of drama. Altman followed it with several more strong, idiosyncratic movies—Brewster McCloud (1970), McCabe and Mrs....

I was hunkered down at Gate C21 next to a very pathetic-looking Christmas tree—patchy, weak light job, zippo presents. The agent behind the desk was singing—off-key and to the tune of “Good King Wenceslas”—that our flight had been delayed another 30 minutes. These days, airline companies know that every customer interaction teeters on a razor-thin edge between viral-marketing sensation and disaster. Thus, flight attendants increasingly serve ginger ale and peanuts while beatboxing or relay the essential features of seatbelt safety with winking double entendre and ironic sexy lunging....

courtesy of the artist Milton Suggs At the 2012 Chicago Jazz Festival, young singer Milton Suggs gave a galvanizing performance that signaled he was on his way to becoming one of Chicago’s finest singers. Then, a few months later, he was gone, transplanted to New York. And whereas a bunch of jazz musicians who’ve also decamped to the east coast—such as saxophonists Greg Ward and Christopher McBride—have returned so frequently it would be easy to think they never split, Suggs hasn’t popped up much at all in his hometown....

Michael Gebert Menu with optional tattoo A month ago I chronicled the process by which Sunday Dinner Club, the underground half of Honey Butter Fried Chicken, made cassoulet for 500 people for its month-long, entirely polar-vortex-appropriate series of cassoulet dinners. (You can see part one here, and part two here, and the audio version of the story is here.) Michael Gebert Cassoulet by the pan Michael Gebert Like a lot of long-baked things, a bit monochromatic...

Under the name Soccer Mommy, 20-year-old Sophie Allison creates the type of mellow rock songs that can break your heart and then make you feel like you’re getting a giant, warm hug in the shift between a verse and a chorus. It’s the type of brilliant songwriting maneuver that might come as a surprise from someone who’s on record in the Fader saying that Avril Lavigne’s Under My Skin (2004) was the first album to change her life....

This Babes With Blades Theatre Company world premiere is a rowdy, rollicking spoof of 18th-century English Restoration comedy, infused with fast-paced farcical energy and lots of swashbuckling swordplay. A product of Babes With Blades’s Fighting Words Program—which develops new works that place heightened language on a par with stage combat in the storytelling-Arthur M. Jolly’s play concerns 15-year-old Trothe (Deanalís Resto), the daughter of a nobleman, who is in love with a flamboyant poet (Felipe Carrasco)....

It was a May midafternoon on the first day of this year’s Sweets & Snacks Expo, and I was catching my breath and charging my phone when I accidentally met the biggest celebrity at the whole three-day event. I was in the Jack Link’s pavilion, one of the largest at the expo, with my friend Sarah Joyce, a photographer and founder of GlitterGuts. Aside from the charging station, the pavilion included a claw arcade game filled with rolled-up T-shirts and several tables of samples—including bites of a new “breakfast bacon” flavored like brown sugar and maple, which had a cloying syrup aftertaste....

Michael Gebert Tunde Wey If you’ve traveled outside the prosperous west, you’ve met the kind of entrepreneur that emerging economies tend to produce—the cabdriver who’s also a travel agent, a caterer, a handyman, a schoolteacher . . . Tunde Wey: We started (revolver) about a year ago. Neither of us had any sort of restaurant ownership experience. [Peter] had worked in restaurants going to college, I hadn’t really worked in any restaurants, though my first job ever, when I was 18 or 19, was at Wendy’s....

Chicago’s bustling new-music community usually focuses on instrumental material—while there are a number of excellent, boundary-pushing singers in town, most ensembles don’t tackle vocal music. Over the past four years or so, that’s made Fonema Consort distinctive and important: the local group, directed by composer Pablo Chin, emphasizes adventurous new work that centers the human voice, even if the sounds those voices contribute don’t usually sound very songlike. On Friday, Fonema Consort releases its second album, Fifth Tableau, on Chicago cassette imprint Parlour Tapes, and on Saturday it celebrates the occasion with a concert at Experimental Sound Studio....

Masayoshi Sukita Happy David Bowie 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.

AP Photo/Ted S. Warren Getting a Lyft in Chicago could change real soon. It was one hell of a mustache ride, but it’s looking more and more like the laissez-faire heyday of rideshare companies like Lyft and Uber is drawing to a close. Two separate pieces of legislation are currently pending that would regulate app-based driver services—a bill at the state level, HB 4075, and an ordinance at the city level....

Click the image for an enlarged PDF version.

A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. Neuköllner Modelle, Sektion 1-2 This multigenerational free-jazz unit takes a familiar approach—an ad hoc sax trio improvises with no preset material. Drummer Sven-Åke Johansson has called its music “constructive free jazz,” a fair way to describe the limber, obliquely melodic, pulse-driven sound he creates with bassist Joel Grip and saxophonist Bertrand Denzler. The group explores within a comforting form, especially Johansson—his drumming clenches and loosens in a contemporary take on the free jazz of the past....

Fanny Ardant and André Dussollier in Resnais’s Life Is a Bed of Roses I know it’s purely coincidental, but it feels fortuitous that there have been so many revivals of Stephen Sondheim musicals in Chicago in the wake of Alain Resnais’s death. Resnais was an outspoken fan of Sondheim’s—he recruited the groundbreaking Broadway composer to write the score for Stavisky… (1974), and it’s presumed that he cast Elaine Stritch in Providence (1978) on the basis of seeing her in Sondheim’s Company when he lived in New York in the early 1970s....

Let your hair down for some hoedown-ing, upbeat listening, and Kanye West-influenced art at this week’s events: