As the numbers of the vaccinated grow and the icicles melt and crash, the twin angst-inducing events of pandemic shutdown and plain old everyday cabin fever seem to recede like the snow cover on the ground. (Memo to pet owners: please pick up after your furry friends!) That production schedule is on hold for now, but meantime 16th Street is producing digital work by the members. Maher’s piece runs free on March 4 through 16th Street’s website....

California-born Chicagoan cellist Alison Chesley, aka Helen Money, studied at Northwestern, played in 90s indie-rock band Verbow, and often collaborates with the likes of Sanford Parker, Bruce Lamont, and Russian Circles. As a solo artist she’s cut her own road through the hills of heavy music, drone, and avant-garde. Her brand-new album, Atomic (Thrill Jockey), is a personal statement on readjusting to the world after the deaths of her parents; it’s about the tension of embracing grief as the new normal while also holding it at arm’s length (and cello bow’s length)....

Ripe 4 Luv Toronto’s Ben Cook—former front man for tough-guy hardcore act No Warning and current guitarist in progressive punk rockers Fucked Up—has been cultivating an under-the-rader solo career since 2009, releasing a nonstop stream of seven-inches and EPs under a variety of different guises and team-ups, including the garage-punk Young Governor and the retro-electro dance duo Yacht Club. On 3/10, his new LP, Ripe 4 Luv is coming out on Slumberland Records—no doubt his biggest solo release yet—and today’s 12 O’Clock Track is a preview song off of it, “Crawling Back to You....

About 2,700 copies of the second issue of the Chicago FoodCultura Clarion have been randomly inserted into print issues of this week’s Reader. If you didn’t snag the inaugural issue in November, there’s a small chance to score a copy of this penultimate installment (or download the full PDF). It’s an easy-on-the-eyes journalistic collaboration between artist Antoni Miralda, University of Chicago anthropologist Stephan Palmié, and a posse of food writers dishing out stories on, among other things, Korean-style Chinese food, La Chaparrita, hot dogs, stockyard blood buttons, a racoon feast, and this fishy Chicago food history footnote by me:...

What are you doing for Banned Books Week this year? It’s not like you don’t have choices. First celebrated in 1982 and promoted now primarily by the American Library Association, Banned Books Week (September 24-30) highlights the year’s ten most challenged works—that is, the ones that have attracted the most complaints from people hoping to get them knocked off public library shelves (the latest figures are from 2016). Famous list alumni include the Harry Potter series and the Holy Bible....

When I heard that the lone surviving Bee Gee, Barry Gibb, was releasing a country album, I didn’t bat an eye. Though the band are best known for the falsetto-laden hits of their disco years, and secondarily for the baroque psychedelia they played in the 1960s (which music snobs like me love), Gibb’s musical life is peppered with precedents for this rootsy turn. Born in the UK and raised in Australia, the brothers Gibb grew up listening to the Everly Brothers and Buddy Holly, and they experimented with country music long before it was fashionable....

The THT Burger at Harding Tavern thehardingtavern.com Since it opened last spring, Logan Square’s Harding Tavern has become one of my favorite low-key neighborhood places to grab dinner and a beer. So it’s both a blessing and a curse that the unassuming sports bar from the owners of Cafe con Leche is quietly serving one of the best burgers in the city. Happens every time: I kid myself into thinking I can settle for a salad—and then I order the THT Burger instead....

Chicago Cultural Center The Rookery Finalists: Monadnock Building, Auditorium Building

T his is a book by a grown-ass woman written for other grown-ass women,” Brittney Cooper, aka Professor Crunk, writes at the beginning of her new book Eloquent Rage. “This is a book for women who expect to be taken seriously and for men who take grown women seriously. This is a book for women who know shit is fucked up. These women want to change things but don’t know where to begin....

This Saturday night after he closes the kitchen, chef Daniel Desir will clear the back dining room and burn the floor at his West Rogers Park restaurant Kizin Creole. Kizin is Chicago’s only Haitian restaurant, so it’s a good thing that only means he’ll be dancing—more specifically, offering the first of four weekly konpa classes leading up to the restaurant’s sixth annual Taste of Haiti festival, on Saturday, September 28....

You know how you’re not supposed to eat grapefruit if you’re taking blood thinners? The same could be true with cannabis, which is known to reduce blood pressure. “That’s for amateurs,” says Andrus. “It’s either-or. Never both.”

Chicago authors Bill Dal Cerro and David Anthony Witter attempt to spell out the abundant contributions Italian-Americans have made to jazz over its century-long history in a new, self-published book called Bebop, Swing, and Bella Musica: Jazz and the Italian American Experience. As a catalog of Italian-American jazz musicians—some of whom changed their names to sound less ethnic such as Flip Phillips (ne Joseph Filipelli) and Louie Bellson (ne Luigi Balassoni)—the book provides a worthwhile service, a kind of low-key encyclopedia featuring short biographies of important figures....

It’s a common misconception that true, filthy rock ’n’ roll died in the early 80s after being eclipsed by new wave, whose shiny commercial sound piled on the gated reverb, drum machines, keytars, and New Romantic vocals. In fact, noisy rock and garage punk flourished underground during that era, thanks to the likes of the Jesus and Mary Chain, Butthole Surfers, Loop, Dwarves, and Australian caveman thudders the Scientists, whose front man and guitarist, Kim Salmon, formed the noirish, blackened-earth postpunk band in 1978 and later put in a few stints in homicidally heavy alt-rock group Beasts of Bourbon....

The first time I heard bassist, guitarist, and singer Tonina Saputo, her voice stopped me in my tracks—her delicate phrasing and heart-wrenching poignancy brought Billie Holiday to mind, except that she was singing in Spanish as well as English. The song was a cover of “Historia de un Amor,” a torchy Panamanian bolero written in the 1950s by Carlos Almarán that’s beloved throughout Latin America, and I wasn’t the only one impressed by her version—Barack Obama listed it among his top songs of 2018....

Hitch*Cocktails 773-561-4665 hitchcocktails.com Runner-Up: SHEBEAST

Christy Fuhrman of Vera @christyfuhrman Runner-Up: Steven Morgan of Formentos

Strange Cargo T-Shirt Deli Finalists: Transit tees, Raygun, Sacra-tee

What sucks the most about having to hunt down a paybox on a Sunday and surrender your credit card to it (or punching up a prepaid mobile app) is the hideous specter it’ll summon of Mayor Richard M. Daley and his infamous parking privatization deal of 2008 (extensively covered in the Reader by Ben Joravsky and Mick Dumke). Rahm Emanuel, running to succeed Daley, promised to remedy this disaster, but then a weird thing happened: when activists challenged it in court, Mayor Emanuel’s city lawyers wound up arguing in the lease’s defense....

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. Revolutionary soul-jazz group the Awakening, which included several AACM affiliates (and appeared in a previous Secret History), enlisted Brown for its two groundbreaking albums, released via the Black Jazz label in 1972 and ’73. Sadly, in 1974 Brown suffered a major setback: a terrible car crash in which he lost several teeth....

I don’t remember exactly what year it was when I first heard French band Les Rita Mitsouko. I do remember that it was thanks to one of the wizards at WZRD—late one night in the early 90s, somebody played an entire side of the band’s 1986 album, The No Comprendo. Perhaps whoever it was just needed to duck out of the booth for a smoke break, but this mystery DJ made me a fan of the band’s mix of punk sensibilities and jazz-influenced synth-pop....