Here’s a novel idea for Spike Lee, and even for Mayor Rahm Emanuel: instead of urging black women to withhold sex to stem violence in their communities, maybe we’d all be better off if elected officials of color (and their allies) stonewalled the City Council and state legislature until the disproportionately white, rich, and powerful enact policy changes that help curb police brutality and engender greater economic opportunities for at-risk populations in Chicago and the state of Illinois....

Tomorrow night the seventh edition of the annual punk-rock festival Ian’s Party begins, and this year it features more than 40 bands in two venues over the course of three days. The event is no stranger to massive lineups. In earlier years even more bands played three different venues spread across downtown Elgin, but this is definitely the loftiest the roster has been since the party moved to Chicago three years ago....

Wild Grass Wherever he is, I hope Alain Resnais is eating Cat Munchies right now—what a wonderful case that would be of afterlife imitating art. The last scene of Resnais’s Wild Grass (2009) is one of the most heroic movie moments I know, wherein the last authentic French surrealist (then 88 years old) resolves to go on fighting to the very end. If you haven’t seen the movie—or if you haven’t seen it on a big screen—do whatever you can to catch it at Doc Films this Thursday at 7 PM, where it’s being shown from 35-millimeter....

Gossip Wolf can’t think of a better cure for the inauguration blues than learning how to help local communities likely to be hurt by the goons in the Trump administration. Luckily, former Geronimo! front man Kelly Johnson, Kickstand Productions owner John Ugolini, and iO Chicago performer Jennifer Cumberworth have organized an all-day event at Beat Kitchen on Saturday, January 21, to give you a head start. No Walls: A Benefit for Marginalized Chicago Communities will feature a panel on getting involved in local politics, plus comedy, poetry, visual art, storytelling, and a concert that includes Troubled Hubble, the Avantist, postpunk three-piece No Men, and rap duo Mother Nature....

Watching a television pilot can be a lot like going on a first date. It starts off awkward. The jokes aren’t landing, the timing’s all wrong. Maybe you drink a little more than usual hoping some good ol’ social lubricant can provide the situation with the sheen that it’s so desperately lacking. But you’re an optimist, a Pollyanna, a firm believer in the better angels of our nature. Just give it another chance, you think, and surely things will get better....

Courtesy of Johalla Projects For the last few months, reigning Best Street Artist Don’t Fret has been transforming a vacant hardware store on Halsted and Lake into a pop-up gallery. A series of his work from the past two years is being transferred to the building’s exterior for the Johalla Projects exhibit “There are Two Seasons in Chicago: Winter and Construction.” It’s an appropriate name—on August 25, a little more than a week after the exhibit’s one-night-only opening on August 16, the building is being demolished....

In Star Trek, space is the final frontier, but for Rafael Toral it’s just another step in an ongoing creative odyssey. The Portuguese electronic musician’s work has gone through several phases. Between 1994 and 2004 he released a series of records that dealt with continuous sounds, often generated using electric guitars and outboard effects. In 2006 he introduced the Space Program, in which he improvised with jazz-rooted rigor against a backdrop of silence, using electronic instruments that he either made himself or converted from commercial products such as toy amplifiers; with the modified instruments, Toral manipulated sine waves and feedback via physical gestures....

Seriously strange Chicago art-rock outfit Ono had been at it since 1980, though after releasing their album Ennui in ’86, the group went silent for decades. It could’ve stayed that way if Reader contributor Steve Krakow hadn’t reached out to a couple founding members—bassist-percussionist P. Michael and front man-slash-performance artist Travis—for his Secret History of Chicago Music strip back in 2007; that year Ono went on to play Krakow’s Four Million Tongues Festival with the End of the World Band....

To Be Takei 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.

Courtesy Big Hassle Maps & Atlases 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.

Ernest Collins Frankie Knuckles House-music legend Frankie Knuckles died yesterday at the age of 59. Along with fellow pioneers such as Larry Levan and Ron Hardy, Frankie helped strip disco’s 4/4 bass thump from its pop setting and refined it into an entirely new genre that emphasized rhythm over melody in a way that American music never had before, and in the process permanently altered the nightclub landscape.

Paleontologists can only make educated guesses about the circadian rhythms of saber-toothed cats, but Chicago’s Sabertooth is indisputably nocturnal. Since November 1992 this indefatigable band—currently a quartet with woodwind players Pat Mallinger and Cameron Pfiffner, organist Pete Benson, and drummer Ted Sirota—has been seen almost exclusively after midnight, presiding over an after-hours jazz party at the Green Mill. In order to celebrate 25 years of that gig, though, the group will brave the afternoon sun on Friday and play the Jay Pritzker Pavilion....

Sometime around 1926, a middle-aged Jew named Mordechai Weiss flees Poland for the United States, taking his four-year-old daughter Rose with him. Rose’s older sister, Lusia, has scarlet fever and can’t travel, so she stays back with Mama. In theory, Lusia and Mama will join Rose and Mordechai later, but the years go by and for one reason and another—Mordechai is too tight to borrow the fare money, Mama doesn’t really want to travel, Lusia marries Duvid and has a baby—they don’t....

On January 2, I braved the howling winds and trekked through mounds of snow to Alderman Ameya Pawar’s north-side office. It was music to my ears. I fell head over heels in love with his candidacy, as though it were a movie by the Coen brothers. I chided him for the Tea Party remark. To his credit, he didn’t hurl F-bombs at me—at least not when I was listening. Instead, he asked if we could meet....

Q: I’m a thirtysomething straight woman married for 16 years. Eighteen months ago, I met a man and there was an immediate attraction. For the first 15 months of our relationship, I was his primary sexual and intimate partner, as both sex and intimacy were lacking in his marriage. (My husband knew of the relationship from the start and is accepting for the most part.) After my lover’s wife found out about me, she suddenly became very responsive to my lover’s sexual and emotional needs....

Hayden Karnitz Geronimo! 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.

Exposing a nipple (or two) can be a costly prospect for women in Chicago, which, when you think about it, is total crap. According to the city’s municipal code, showing off “any portion of the breast at or below the upper edge of the areola thereof any female person” carries a fine of at least $100 up to as much as $500. Meanwhile, for men, it’s basically no shirt, no shoes, no problem....

Weese left the details of each interior open for custom design. The previous owner added a few pomo light fixtures and an intricate wall carving in the foyer. Says the other listing agent, Tanya Hamilton, also of Jameson Sotheby’s: “It will be very interesting to see what the new owners do with the space.”

The other night, as I was coming off my first weekend at the Rhinoceros Theater Festival—a six-week fringe performance extravaganza, produced annually for the last 25 years by Curious Theatre Branch—a friend asked me, “What does ‘fringe’ mean?” Good question. I flailed around for a while, trying to pull a response out of the seven shows I’d just seen, but eventually realized that I was giving examples rather than an answer....

I’ve lately fallen into a K-pop K-hole, listening to Spotify’s K-Pop Daebak playlist. The Korean word daebak can mean different things in different contexts: “surprise!,” “big success!,” or “awesome!” It’s also the name of a new Korean barbecue restaurant on the second floor of the once desolate eastern corner of the Chinatown Square mall. Daebak is owned by a woman named Namhee Kim, who a few years ago, drawn by an untapped market of K-pop-loving Chinese teenagers, opened the K-Pop of Chinatown store on nearby Wentworth....