Not one of the 17 people held for questioning at O’Hare International Airport Saturday was a refugee—or a terrorist for that matter. Most of them were visa or green card holders who had previously been granted long-term or permanent residency in the United States. Two of them were babies who had been born in the U.S. and who had been taken to Iran to meet their extended families. But all had the misfortune of being in transit on Friday evening when President Donald Trump issued his executive order banning nationals of six mostly Muslim countries from entering the U....

Andrew Cioffi/Lyric Opera of Chicago Lyric’s Anthony Freud, Andrew Davis, and via Skype, Renee Fleming, who’s about to debut at the Super Bowl Earlier this week Lyric Opera revealed its 2014-2015 “Diamond Anniversary” season of eight operas, a musical, and other special events. General director Anthony Freud and music director Andrew Davis presided over the announcement at the Civic Opera House in the flesh, flanked, at various points, by a slightly pixilated version of creative consultant Renee Fleming on twin screens, via Skype....

On Sunday singular German drummer Jaki Liebezeit died in his sleep at age 78 while suffering a sudden case of pneumonia. He leaves behind a profound musical legacy, the cornerstone of which is his membership in influential art-rock band Can—nearly five decades later, the records he made with that group sound fresher and more original than anything the vast majority of their contemporaries produced. Can were key figures in the Krautrock scene (along with the likes of Kraftwerk, Neu!...

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

Interviewed in the early 1970s, Groucho Marx explained why he had stopped working with his brothers two decades earlier, bringing down the curtain on the greatest comedy team in movie history. “By the time we got around to making those last films I was close to 60,” he said. “I found myself hanging upside down and doing all sorts of crazy things a man that age shouldn’t be doing. I had saved my money and I was bored....

Tonight Chicago jazz and improvised-music fixture Tim Daisy launches a short midwestern and southern tour with the fiery Polish reedist Mikolaj Trzaska, a regular collaborator in recent years. They first came together as members of Ken Vandermark’s Resonance Ensemble, and they’ve since worked together in the quartet Inner Ear with New York trombonist Steve Swell and Swedish tubaist Per-Åke Holmlander. The duo’s shows are in support of a terrific, concise new album the pair just released on the drummer’s Relay Records imprint called In This Moment....

The rust belt is getting more attention than it’s had in a long time. Since November an entire subgenre of journalism has been dedicated to understanding the people who elected the new president, many with datelines from Michigan or Ohio or Wisconsin. The first, narrative half of the book is even more direct. “An important part of Midwestern identity is believing you don’t have an accent,” McClelland writes on the first page, that “there’s absolutely nothing exotic about Midwestern speech”—because there’s not supposed to be anything exotic about the midwest at all....

Jeff Bridges and Tim Robbins in Arlington Road Channel surfing the other night, I came across a movie I’d never heard of—a 1999 thriller called Arlington Road. It had an A-list cast—Jeff Bridges, Tim Robbins, Joan Cusack—and something to say, and its subject was domestic terrorism. Contemporary and ephemeral. The movie wouldn’t have been made before 1995, when Timothy McVeigh blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City, a hideous act of destruction that everyone originally assumed was the work of radical Muslims....

Chicago’s flag will still have four stars. The city announced yesterday that it will recognize “exemplary Chicago artists and arts institutions” with the Fifth Star Awards, a new honor that’ll be presented in a free program at the Pritzker Pavilion on September 17. You can’t apply for this honor, but you might be able to do a little lobbying: a city spokesperson said winners will be picked by “DCASE and select members of the Cultural Advisory Council....

“People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York—a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children,” wrote Washington Post opinion writer Richard Cohen on November 11, 2013, speaking of the election of Bill de Blasio to succeed Michael Bloomberg as the Big Apple’s big kahuna. Added Cohen, parenthetically: “(Should I mention that Bill de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, used to be a lesbian?...

Silence Once Begun, Chicagoan Jesse Ball’s fourth novel, is a great page-turner. I say this in part because the simple language, the spareness of the exposition, and the systematic implementation of a blueprint the reader is given at the outset are as hypnotic as any metronome. I also say it because there’s very little on each page. The expansive margins and blank pages between frequent chapter breaks push the reader swiftly forward....

Less than 24 hours before its splashy debut party at Logan Arcade last month, VEC9 caught fire. Literally. The arcade game’s three creators were busy showing it off to the arcade bar’s enthusiastic staff when a crusty wire shorted and blew a transformer, setting some of the internal machinery ablaze. VEC9’s key component is a rickety brand of technology not seen in arcade games in a generation: a vector monitor....

“She’s back, she’s dead, and she thinks we’re still dating!” shouts Anton Yelchin with an irrepressible gleam in his eye about a half hour into Burying the Ex, a genial horror comedy now available to rent at Redbox kiosks. That moment pretty much sums up the plot and tone of the movie. No matter how lowbrow or silly the material gets, everyone seems to be having a good time in Ex, and no wonder: it’s the first feature in more than five years to be directed by Joe Dante (Gremlins, Small Soldiers), one of the most fun-loving filmmakers alive....

Laura Colella in Breakfast With Curtis Breakfast With Curtis There I go again, making the movie sound like something it’s not. Curtis is hardly a public service announcement—rather, it’s the freshest American comedy to play Chicago so far this year. One scene in the film for which I’m especially grateful (and which the pleasant weather has made me think about the most) comes in the second half. Two of Curtis’s bohemian neighbors (played by Colella and Adele Parker) decide to celebrate their elderly landlady’s birthday by throwing a tea party in the backyard....

, a George Sanders vehicle that centers on a hostage crisis at the Los Angeles Public Library.) And as an added bonus, everything in Noir City will screen from 35-millimeter. Another compelling rarity in this year’s Noir City is the 1954 drama Drive a Crooked Road, which screens tomorrow at 4:45 PM. Written by a young Blake Edwards and directed by the underrated Richard Quine (Bell Book and Candle, Strangers When We Meet), the film stars Mickey Rooney as a mechanic who agrees to serve as a getaway driver in a robbery after he falls in love with a gangster’s girlfriend....

A tagline on one of the promotional posters for the new (as of last month) season of HBO’s True Detective says, “We get the world we deserve.” Season two is set primarily in Vinci, a fictional armpit of southern California where the industrial waste flows like wine and every person in power has his slimy fingers in one criminal conspiracy or another. They’re scummy people, and Vinci is the scummy world they deserve....

Revolution’s 4th Year Beer by candlelight On Saturday Revolution Brewing threw itself a huge sold-out birthday party at its Kedzie tap room and brewery, which opened in May 2012, a little more than two years after its Logan Square brewpub. The 4th Year Crazy Party, as it was called, featured 13 food-and-beer pairings, showing off not just the talents of Revolution’s brewers but also the considerable ingenuity of the kitchen staff at the pub....

Ricky B The addictive, hyped-up party rap sound from New Orleans known as bounce has been around long before Big Freedia scored her own Fuse show and toured with the reunited Postal Service. One of the players in the bounce scene back in the 90s was Ricky Bickham, aka Ricky B, who was rumored to have died in the aughts after he stopped recording and performing in 2001. Bickham returned to the stage in 2010, and last month he made his first trip to Chicago to play songs off Urban Unrest and Sinking City’s 2013 Ricky B compilation B Is for Bounce: New Orleans Rap Classics 1994-95....