The AMC River East isn’t exactly Grauman’s Chinese Theater and the Chicago International Film Festival isn’t Cannes, but over a week and a half each October some of the better new films and many of the people who made them show up at this airport terminal-like multiplex a half mile short of Navy Pier on Illinois Street. When I pitched writing something about the festival this year, I envisioned wandering about and eavesdropping on the excited conversations of film lovers and putting together an impressionistic travelogue-type essay....

One hundred and twenty-seven years after August Strindberg penned his seminal naturalist tragedy Miss Julie, it’s not difficult to feel the still-resonating percussion of its assault on bourgeois theatrical sensibilities. Beyond Strindberg’s overhaul of performance conventions (no footlights, minimal makeup, placing actors where they might actually stand in a room rather than stranding them before the prompter’s box) is the title character’s ferocious sexuality. Miss Julie, an aristocrat’s daughter, addles, provokes, humiliates, and emasculates her father’s valet until he ravishes her in the servants’ quarters—while his fiancee sleeps in the next room....

On Friday, November 23, Chicago-based rapper KC Ortiz performs at Subterranean as part of a showcase organized by Chicago label Futurehood, which supports gay and transgender musicians of color. She’s no longer actively working with the label, founded in 2015 by rapper Mister Wallace and producer Aceb00mbap, but their parting was amicable—there’s a reason the concert is called “Futurehood & Friends.” What church is on the cover of Church Tapes? That was my church when I was a little kid, True Vine Missionary Baptist Church in Mobile, Alabama....

Smack Dab, a teeny, tiny new bakery that just opened in Rogers Park across from the Morse el stop, smack dab between the Glenwood and Pub 626 (formerly the ill-fated second location of Bullhead Cantina), has been open for just short of two months, but it has already changed my life, just as co-owner Christine Forster promised it would. Aimee Levitt It tasted like a real pastry! True, it was dry, but in a sophisticated, crumbly way, not a depressing Passover pastry sort of way....

With the certainty of a Trump presidential library in our not-too-distant future, it’s a little hard to get worked up over the Obama Presidential Center and Golf Course that’s about to emerge in Jackson Park. The closings would, however, facilitate the creation of an elite 18-hole championship golf course from the Chicago Park District’s existing Jackson Park and South Shore courses, now separated by Marquette Drive. That’ll have to be a mega-reduction: the top rate for residents last summer was $33....

Q: My wife has been seriously ill for three years, and I have been her sole caregiver. The doctors here weren’t getting the job done, so we made the difficult decision for her to move 2,000 miles away to start over and be near her family while I stayed behind. Our sex life has been nonexistent since she became ill. She offered me a “hall pass” with two rules: (1) It couldn’t be anyone I worked with, and (2) she didn’t want to know about it....

Back in the 60s England was a crucial force in the development of improvised music. A raft of distinctive players reared on American jazz diverged from a stylistic path to forge the genuinely nonidiomatic approach of free improvisation. The legacy, influence, and importance of folks like Derek Bailey, John Stevens, Tony Oxley, and Evan Parker, among others, remains undiminished half a century after they first emerged. The UK has continued to boast a formidable jazz and improvised music scene with loads of talented players coming along year after year, but for much of the 80s and 90s those folks lacked a lasting vision....

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

The Reader‘s final issue of the year will be devoted to flash fiction, the very short story form that crams a narrative arc, character development, and compelling writing into a small number of words. For us it’s 500—500 (or fewer!) good words, in the best possible order. Writers can be located anywhere, but a connection to Chicago is strongly encouraged. Submissions are due November 16 at midnight CST to flashfiction@chicagoreader....

Just a few weeks before Carla Miles’s first vendor event, tragedy struck: at 19 weeks pregnant with her second child, she found out her baby had a fatal birth defect and wasn’t expected to survive. “I put all of the frustration, anger, and hurt I was feeling into really hitting the pavement and promoting my products,” Miles says. “Since Popped Handmade was birthed out of the loss of my son, it’s even more important to me to give it my all and use it as a tool to help others....

ARTIST: Jay Ryan SHOW: Tortoise and the Lonesome Organist at Empty Bottle on Sun 3/26 MORE INFO: thebirdmachine.com

The Frequency Series, programmed by Reader staff writer Peter Margasak, presents new classical and experimental music at Constellation nearly every Sunday night. Its first concert was in April 2013, and the series celebrates its (almost) fourth anniversary with its second annual festival, which this year runs from Tuesday, February 14, through Sunday, February 19. Constellation hosts four of its seven concerts; the other three are at the Museum of Contemporary Art, the U....

Q: I’m a straight female in my mid-20s. I’ve been dating a wonderful guy for two years—but I recently found something that has put me on edge. Before we met, he was in a relationship with a terrible, alcoholic, and mentally unstable woman. They got pregnant early in the relationship and stayed together for about five years. We met a year after they broke up. I felt like I’d come to terms with the ugliness of his past, with his trying to stay in a bad relationship for the sake of his child and the rest of it....

John Carpenter’s Ghosts of Mars (2001) is not a great film. For one thing, it’s more of a movie—there are guns and special effects and pretty ladies and it takes place on Mars—than what we like to call cinema. It’s not even a great movie, as it came out a few weeks after September 11, and its procolonization message fails to reflect the cultural zeitgeist of those tumultuous times. So I want to talk about the state of criticism....

Last year Laser Background main man Andy Molholt told music site ThrdCoast that from an early age he’s gleaned inspiration from composer Koji Kondo, who as the architect of the original Super Mario Bros. is one of the most influential composers in contemporary culture. “Those songs you can hear again and again on a loop,” Molholt explained. The Philadelphia multi-instrumentalist applies the lessons of repetition to indie pop, and his charmingly lo-fi Laser Background songs bridge the gap between the blocky eight-bit world he maneuvered as a child and the guitar-rock realities of his present....

In the wee hours of August 9, 2016, beat maker and engineer Ivan “Ikon” Pryor left Fort Knox, a huge Old Irving Park building that houses a labyrinth of rehearsal spaces and recording studios, to buy Red Bull with a friend at a nearby gas station. He’d been hanging out at Fort Knox’s suite 42, home to local hip-hop collective and indie label Private Stock, and his friend had woken him from a nap to work on music....

Bob Doran Nels Cline Singers 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.

Labor Day, the bellwether of the end of summer, is nearly a week away. Cram as much as you can into a packed weekend of outdoor activities. Here’s some of what we recommend: Sun 8/27: The Slow Food Farm Roast at Local Foods (1427 W. Willow) invites 13 different aficionados to serve up bites and demonstrate how everyone can incorporate the movement’s principles into daily eating. 2-5 PM, $75

On Friday the British group the Zombies play the Star Plaza Theatre in Merrillville, Indiana, and they’ll be performing the album for which they’re best known, 1968’s Odessey and Oracle, in its entirety. The Zombies famously split up before the album was released, and even though they recorded some incredible singles Odessey and Oracle is so well regarded that it tends to be the only album that casual fans know about....