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Alison Green The crowd during Gwar’s set Several faithful Reader staffers, deterred to varying degrees by chilly wind, persistent rain, and unavoidable mud, send fragmentary dispatches from day one of Riot Fest. By 7 PM I was staking out the Dark Matter booth, on a quest for some much needed warmth and caffeine. I was also hoping to get my hands on a cup of the Mastodon blend—if you haven’t read the description (which sounds incredible), I urge you to do so....

Roads? Where Rich Weissensel is going he doesn’t need roads—at least while behind the wheel of his custom DeLorean hovercraft. “You can fly it over just about anything,” the amateur mechanic says gleefully. “I’ve taken it on water, on the beach—the best surface is ice.” He Frankensteined the vehicle in 2002 using a hovercraft air cushion and the stainless steel body of Doc Brown’s preferred automobile. Next March, as union plumbers dye the Chicago River green for Saint Patrick’s Day, Weissensel intends to shoot down the waterway in the craft as part of a yearlong 30th-anniversary celebration of Back to the Future that’s being organized by his club, the DeLorean Midwest Connection....

Still Dance the Stars There’s one thoroughly decent moment in Jayme McGhan’s play, getting its world premiere now in a coproduction by Chicago Dramatists and the New Light Theater Project. That’s when Anne, a dance teacher and bereaved mother, performs a pas de deux with Hope, the embodied spirit of her stillborn baby. It works because it’s plain, clear, organic in the sense that dance is Anne’s natural mode of expression, and because Bethany Geraghty’s Anne and Ariana Sepúlveda put Ashlee Wassmund’s choreography over with such easy grace....

Appropriately, Mayor Emanuel’s name isn’t mentioned in the 43-page indictment on bribery charges handed down today by the feds against Barbara Byrd-Bennett, who was hired by the mayor to run the Chicago Public Schools. For almost a year before Mayor Emanuel hired her as CEO—I did mention that she was hired by Rahm, right?—Byrd-Bennett was a “paid consultant” for the Supes Academy. According to the feds, “Byrd-Bennett steered no-bid contracts worth more than $23 million” to Supes “in exchange for an expectation of hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes and kickbacks....

Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s staging of The Tempest was hotly anticipated on fall preview lists, everybody (including me) getting worked up over its various components. Songs by Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan. Choreography by Matt Kent of Pilobolus. Local favorite Larry Yando in the lead role. And an intriguingly odd couple of directors: Aaron Posner, author of Stupid Fucking Bird, a metatheatrical update of Chekhov’s The Seagull that became a hit for Sideshow Theatre in 2014, and—most fertile for column inches—Teller, the famously silent half of Penn & Teller, who was expected to bring legit magical effects to Shakespeare’s play about an old sorcerer executing his last great trick....

Ryan Lowry’s Two Years Gossip Wolf reported last month that Reader contributor and local punk stalwart Ryan Lowry (who currently plays in hardcore outfit Violent End) was putting the finishing touches on his first photo book, Two Years. Lowry’s an excellent photographer, but I do have a bias—I’ve been lucky enough to have his photos accompany several of my Reader stories. Still, I’d be remiss not to recommend folks seek out his work, and tonight’s an excellent opportunity to do just that....

Mike Sula Oyster shooter, Tsu Kiji FIsh Market A part of me feels it’s unfair to criticize a Japanese restaurant for broad and unfocused menus, especially since a place like Japonais by Morimoto executes one so well, and by early reports the new giant on the block Momotaro seems very promising. Usually that’s not the case. So with an open mind I skimmed through the menu at Tsu Kiji Fish Market, the newish West Town sushi joint named for Tokyo’s wholesale fish market, which is pretty much the Godzilla of seafood markets....

Chicago-based photographer Zakkiyyah Najeebah went to this year’s Pitchfork Music Festival to document the black women in attendance for the Reader. It’s hard to say definitively, but we can’t help but think that the increased visibility of black women this year had something to do with the #blackgirlmagic provided by the likes of Kilo Kish, Jamila Woods, and Solange—who closed the festival on Sunday night and hosted art, music, and poetry events throughout the city as well as an installation at Pitchfork....

If you’re a fan of rap or R&B and have a thing for vinyl, chances are you got the gift of wax this holiday season. Did somebody surprise you with an LP copy of, say, Kendrick Lamar’s Section.80, Frank Ocean’s Channel Orange, or Kanye West’s Yeezus? Well, whether you know it or not, you’re now the proud owner of a bootleg record. I first saw a real live bootleg in spring 2013 at the CHIRP Record Fair, at which point I’d already encountered online evidence of a bootleg vinyl version of Frank Ocean’s Channel Orange....

In July 2015, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro came to Chicago and announced the agency’s renewed commitment to “affirmatively furthering” fair housing. The requirement that its grantees not spend federal dollars on discriminatory housing practices, and indeed that its grant recipients work toward reversing the effects of federally-subsidized housing segregation, was spelled out in the 1968 Fair Housing Act. For decades after the law was passed, however, it was unclear what it meant, exactly, to “affirmatively further fair housing....

September is a magical time on the shores of Lake Michigan. The water has been warmed to perfection by the summer heat. On a sunny 75-degree day the conditions for swimming are perfect. More perfect still are the conditions for enjoying that swim, particularly due to the absence of fascistic lifeguards. No one who hasn’t spent a lifetime swimming in open water and knows herself to be a strong swimmer will understand why the best time at the beach is when the lifeguards are off duty....

About halfway through a plate of jambalaya at Pearl’s Southern Comfort, it occurred to me that I’d never given much thought to the distinction between Cajun and creole cuisines. In fact, I’ve probably used the terms interchangeably, which makes me a terrible southerner. (Well, that and defecting to Chicago.) The Becks were already serving Louisiana-style dishes at Toons, which is known for having better fare than the average fried-food feed trough—there are po’ boys on the menu along with nachos and mozzarella sticks....

Brand-new Phoenix Rising Productions flaps its wings with the world premiere of company writer-lyricist Aaron Woodstein’s episodic musical cum parable about one of history’s most terrible enfant terribles. After Agrippa has her husband, Claudius, killed, clearing the way for her son Nero to ascend to emperor of Rome, a series of assassinations follows, related sometimes in song, other times through vigorous action sequences, and culminating in the Great Fire of Rome....

Wonder Years 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 of Mike Lebovitz Playing an imaginary toy piano? The first time I saw Mike Lebovitz was in 2012 when he hosted a Just for Laughs event (remember those?!) christened the Chicago Underground Comedy Presents: Secret Big-Time Local Comedy Showcase. As is common with stacked comedy-festival bills, the show had its fair share of big, once-local talent pop in, like Hannibal Buress, Kyle Kinane, and Jeff Garlin. Eddie Pepitone and Pete Holmes were there too....

Ryan Lowry Nnamdi at home Local multi-instrumentalist Nnamdi Ogbonnaya embraces his oddness. When I went to meet Ogbonnaya at his place to interview him for last year’s People Issue he greeted me wearing just a pair of boxers and brandishing a broken antique pistol that was spray-painted gold. Ogbonnaya didn’t shy away from talking about being weird in our interview:

Tres Awesome Mad Men premiere party 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 you’re going to produce a theatrical production based on interviews with Chicagoans talking about food, Albany Park is as good a place to start as any. Not only is it one of the most diverse neighborhoods in the city—and in the country—it’s also home to the Albany Park Theater Project, an ensemble of teenagers that has a history of producing shows that are honest, funny, and inspirational in the best possible way: after you see them, you want to do something....

Jason Van Dyke was found guilty of second-degree murder today, but in an overwhelming number of cases in America, if a cop shoots someone because he’s angry he’s considered a murderer, while if he shoots someone because he’s scared, he’s innocent. He attributes a lot of the problem to a generalized sense of fear—particularly white people’s racial fear of nonwhites. “We obsess over order, fear trumps civil rights,” Hayes writes. Fear of crime waves, of terrorist attacks, gets converted into and becomes the justification for the war on the drugs, the war on terror, mass incarceration, and on a more elemental level the police killings of young black men....