Sandy Kim Eagulls 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.

If art is all about subverting the expected, then the people at Lay’s are some of our most popular and profitable contemporary artists. Forget Jeff Koons: you can find Lay’s experimental flavors in every goddamned grocery and convenience store in our fair nation. Every year, they give us the opportunity to appreciate their genius even more when they turn over new-potato-chip-flavor-devising duties to their loyal customers. Coming up with a new potato chip flavor isn’t easy, y’all!...

Is the Lucas Museum just like the Field, the Shedd, and the Adler? Another great civic institution funded by some guy whose name is on the building? If it did, what we’d already have on the lakefront would be three museums celebrating the art of retailing. Maybe with a library of catalogs and a monument to Frango mints. Followed by “I’m not going to give you a million dollars.” John G....

Rich Hein/Sun-Times What’s that Mayor Rahm’s whispering to Alderman Solis? Could it be something about how to get the South Loop deal through the zoning committee? For all the energy he’s exerted on his big DePaul/Marriott deal, you’d think Mayor Emanuel would be shouting its praises from the rooftops. He was up to his old tricks at last Wednesday’s meeting with the zoning committee for the DePaul basketball arena and the Marriott hotel—which you, the taxpayer, will pay to build on land that you will also pay to purchase....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Friday, March 17, 2017. Happy Saint Patrick’s Day! CPD top cop Eddie Johnson meets with Attorney General Jeff Sessions Chicago Police Department superintendent Eddie Johnson and several other police officials from around the country met with Attorney General Jeff Sessions Thursday in Washington, D.C. The group discussed how the U.S. Department of Justice and other parts of the federal government can help combat urban gun violence....

CLAIRE PASQUIER Alessandro Renda in Noise in the Waters (Rumore di acque) 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.

GETTY Throw some ripe tomatoes. 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.

MOUZAM MAKKAR Drekfest 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.

Maybe you had the TV-commercial-perfect Labor Day: a racially diverse group of neighbors barbecuing in a lush backyard, everyone with a frosty can of [insert beer brand here] in hand. But I had the organizing-stuff-before-school-starts kind, lived vicariously through social media. And from those channels, it seemed like there was a lot of transitioning going on. According to Facebook, a lot of people got married—Boka chef Lee Wolen did; so did La Sirena Clandestina chef John Manion and food writer Matt Kirouac....

One Christmas when Detroit native Sophie Evanoff was six years old, she asked Santa for a play kitchen. She ended up getting her wish, though on Christmas morning she had to look for the kitchen outside on the deck, since her parents told her Santa couldn’t fit it through the chimney. That little red and white kitchen ended up foreshadowing Sophie’s career as a pastry chef and owner of Vanille Patisserie, with four locations throughout Chicago....

ARTIST: Ryan Duggan SHOW: Tinkerbelles, Foul Tip, and Space Blood at Empty Bottle on Mon 9/11 MORE INFO: ryanduggan.com

Dan Crawford has helped organize every Newberry Library Book Fair since the event began in 1985. Thirty fairs later, the 56-year-old is still excited by the wonderfully random and rare literature donated to the annual sale of more than 120,000 books. “I’m still seeing things I haven’t seen before,” he says. “You just never know what people have in their basements.” Recently, a man donated a large collection of Asian studies....

John Matteson Walt Delaney, Alex Honnet, and Caitlin Stephan, the founders of the Upstairs Gallery When the Upstairs Gallery was voted Best Underground Art Space in this year’s Best of Chicago readers’ poll, the folks who run the space at 5219 N. Clark took that as a sign to go out on top. At the end of the month the performance collective’s physical space will close down. The space is going out with a bang with performances at 8 and 10:30 PM every night of the week until the end of August, and a packed schedule from 6 PM until well past 1 AM during the weekend of August 21-23 for the second annual Jangleheart Circus....

Gossip Wolf has been impatiently waiting for the release of the full-length Wax Trax! Records documentary since first hearing in 2015 that it was in the works. On Saturday, April 1, the Vic presents two screenings of a rough cut of the flick—these days bearing the title Industrial Accident: The Story of Wax Trax! Records. Each screening will be followed by a Q&A with a different panel of label luminaries, including Dead Kennedys front man Jello Biafra, My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult singer Groovie Mann, Paul Barker of Lead Into Gold, and Barker’s Ministry and Revolting Cocks bandmate Chris Connelly....

Pro tip for aspiring playwrights: If you want success, write something that purports to skewer the American mythos but actually doesn’t—or at least not in ways that might create discomfort in the bourgeois theatergoing audience you’ll need if you want to make it big. True enough, but Diaz is content to otherize the xenophobic, racist impulses in our national psyche, making clear demarcations between right-thinking and wrong-thinking characters, flattering rather than challenging (or, God forbid, implicating) his audience....

As a grammarian, I commend Spike Jonze for using the objective case to name his comedy Her, because this futuristic tale, about a man who falls in love with his computer’s artificially intelligent operating system, is preoccupied with the old subject-object relationship. The subject is Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix), a lonely bachelor in a Los Angeles of the near future; his bland, bespectacled face, lit by icy blue eyes and bisected by a cheesy Tom Selleck moustache, fills the screen in gigantic close-ups....

AP File Photo President John F. Kennedy, speaking in the House chamber in January 1963, with Vice President Lyndon Johnson behind him. Kennedy put poverty on the presidential agenda, but it was Johnson who set the War on Poverty in motion. Not everyone was singing Lyndon Johnson’s praises after he declared war on poverty 50 years ago this month. “Assuming that by spreading a bit of poverty among the rich through taxation, you could spread a bit of richness among the poor, who gets the credit?...

Don’t be misled by the Weight’s unassuming appearance. I realize that Piece can be a tough place to spend much quality time, especially if you’re old and cranky and prefer to be able to talk to people rather than hollering at their ear holes from point-blank range. (I like loud bands, not loud bars.) It’s a noisy cavern of a restaurant, and its multitudinous flat-screen TVs attract yahoos who like to yell at sports in groups....

Tomorrow night posthardcore group Planes Mistaken for Stars return to town less than five months after their first 2015 reunion tour brought them to 1st Ward in Wicker Park. Formed in Peoria in 1997 but based in Denver since ’99, they’ll head to Logan Square to play Quenchers, which feels too small for a band with such a devoted following—though the dive-bar setting is fitting. Many of the group’s best songs sound like the work of disgruntled bar regulars who’ve been dragged into the sunlight after a long night of excess—though of course the execution is tighter than I’d expect to hear from anyone with a hangover....

It’s difficult to imagine a dish more universally Latin American than arroz con pollo. Everyone eats it, but it’s different everywhere you go. It’s cooked with achiote in Puerto Rico. They add ketchup in Nicaragua. In Peru it’s dark beer. But even with all the variations from country to country, one thing unites them all: the pollo is always cooked in the arroz. The reason for that is elementary. You give that rice to the chicken, and the chicken gives back to the rice....