Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place. Older strips are archived here.

“I always had the desire to create an exhibition space,” conceptual artist Edra Soto says. Offered a solo show at Northeastern Illinois University in 2012, Soto and her husband, Dan Sullivan—owner of Navillus Woodworks, which specializes in custom fabrication for art museums and galleries—imagined creating a structure to display their personal art collection. “The show would be an opportunity to comment on and talk about the artist-run spaces in Chicago. There’s a big community—people exhibiting in their loft or in their home or in their studio,” Sullivan says....

With any film festival, there’s the long and the short of it. More specifically, there are narrative and documentary features, which comprise the bulk of most major festivals, and then there are the short films, officially defined by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as “an original motion picture that has a running time of 40 minutes or less, including all credits.” Often overlooked for bigger stars, larger budgets, and longer running times, short films nevertheless embody the philosophy of any good film festival, which is to revel in the thrill of discovery and, more importantly, the opportunity to take risks with the medium....

[content-6] Dowell has a point. The #35—which runs all the way from Cicero Avenue to 31st Street Beach and has seven-day service, longer hours, and shorter headways—saw an average of 5,077 rides taken per weekday in 2017. It’s also worth noting that this isn’t the first time sustainable transportation has been blamed for traffic jams on this portion of 31st. In 2014, years before the bus pilot, then-Chicago Tribune transportation reporter Jon Hilkevitch called new protected bike lanes on this stretch “the reason why frustrated drivers often find themselves crawling in heavy traffic....

Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago. Katie Obriot is one of my favorite minimalists in town. She’s always so chic, fresh, and modern, with casual sleek hair and accessories. This time she opted for a light chambray dress complemented by a statement necklace made from moccasin scraps by Mannimals (both their jewelry and footwear are available at Study Hall—the baby moccasins are totally adorable)....

For the largest punk fest in North America, in some ways Riot Fest isn’t actually all that punk. When it comes to the gender balance of its lineups, the Chicago-based music festival is solidly within the status quo. I crunched the numbers for every Riot Fest lineup since its founding in 2005, including the Chicago, Toronto, and Denver festivals as well as the one-off 2012 events in Philadelphia, Dallas, and Brooklyn....

In the early 1800s, when passenger pigeons comprised one quarter of the bird population east of the Mississippi, a flock flying over what’s now Chicago could darken the sky for three days. By 1874, when an Evanstonian named J.G. Allyn killed this specimen and donated it to the Chicago Academy of Sciences (where it was preserved and stuffed), hunters in Wisconsin could bring down 1,200 pigeons before breakfast and cooks could buy birds ready for eating by the barrel....

Nick Cave began making last year’s quietly intense Skeleton Tree (Bad Seed Ltd.) well before his son Arthur’s tragic fall from a cliff in July 2015, but its brooding tone and crushing, inescapable darkness were clearly heightened by the impact of his passing. The opening couplet on the first song, “Jesus Alone,” features Cave intoning solemnly, “You fell from the sky / Crash landed in a field.” It’s hard not to interpret every line and sound—like the distant cries that emerge at the ends of tracks—as by-products of Cave’s loss....

About halfway into Sinister 2, there’s a scene in which two lonely people share a drink on the porch of a country house late at night. One (Shannyn Sossamon) is a young mother who recently fled her possessive, abusive husband. The other (James Ransone) is a former deputy sheriff who lost his job after he was falsely accused of a horrific crime. He’s since become a private detective, and his most recent investigation led him to the abandoned farmhouse where the mother is temporarily living with her twin boys....

When iO opened its new facility on Kingsbury Street, one of its most exciting aspects was the Mission, a theater that would be independent of iO’s typical programming structure and left completely in the hands of improv greats TJ Jagodowski and Dave Pasquesi. Last week the duo decided the pressure of the production side of things wasn’t their style, so they relinquished control, handing it back to iO founder Charna Halpern....

A first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. “I don’t think the station is how most people picture it. It’s not a collection of igloos connected by underground tunnels or anything like that. It’s a little town, basically. An ugly little town. Very drab, lots of beige and gray. It was originally built by the navy in 1955.

As part of my ongoing effort to join Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s crusade to say good things about Chicago, I’m happy to note that Donald Trump hates our fair city. On one level, his hatred for Chicago makes no sense, as the city’s been pretty good to Trump. Sure, protesters did close down the one major campaign rally he tried to hold in town, at the UIC Pavillion in March 2016. But most of those demonstrators were relatively powerless malcontents—you know, people like me....

Mise-en-scene, the art of telling a story through visual composition more than editing, rarely comes up in discussion of Hollywood blockbusters. In the age of green-screen technology and computer graphics, it’s increasingly difficult to distinguish production design from special effects, and even when you can, the settings of these films are typically uninspired. In Peter Jackson’s Tolkien adaptations and in most of the Marvel Studios output (to name two popular examples), the environments never look quite inhabitable, however impressive they may be on a technical level....

If you got through last winter without looking at least once at real estate listings in San Diego, you’re made of sturdier stuff than I am. But we both have a leg up on lifelong Chicagoan Tony Fitzpatrick, who announces in his latest collagelike show—the fourth and final installment in a series that began with This Train in 2010—that he’s decamping for New Orleans. What he longs for is the Chicago of Nelson Algren, Studs Terkel, and Mike Royko—a gritty, noisy, built-from-nothing sort of place inhabited by a colorful cast of hustlers, charlatans, bar-stool philosophers, and salt-of-the-earth types....

City living doesn’t often allow for the sheer vastness of a 7,200-square-foot mansion. But for Joe Mansueto it does. Founder of investment research firm Morningstar, Inc., and himself an investor in Wrapports LLC—the group that bought the Sun-Times in 2011 and the Reader in 2012—Mansueto is about a year and a half into the construction of a new castle that will undoubtedly be one of even Lincoln Park’s most impressive. The Chicago billionaire is relocating because, as he puts it, his family outgrew their two-bedroom condo on Michigan Avenue....

Chicagoans is a first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. This week’s Chicagoan is Angela Martin, 22, parkour practitioner and teacher. “In my classes, I work with a lot of people who don’t have any movement background. I’ll show them basic bear crawls, crawling on the floor with hands and feet and nothing else touching the ground, keeping your back low and parallel with the ground....

It’s fall cookbook season again, and with that comes another round of local food books that I’ll be cooking from. There are new books from Graham Elliot, kosher chef Laura Frankel, frequent Rick Bayless collaborator and Trib columnist JeanMarie Brownson, and Brooklyn chef Dale Talde, whose book on Filipino-American junk food fusion is heavily informed by his Chicago upbringing. “The Wooded Isle cocktail is pretty near and dear to us. It was a bar team collaboration with one of our bartenders, Demetrius Green, who passed away suddenly this past January....

Con Air Looking for something to do today? Agenda‘s got you covered. For more on these events and others, check out the Reader‘s Agenda page.

Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks 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.

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