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Founded in 1989, the Polish Film Festival in America drew its commercial strength from the city’s giant Polish-American population, but more than a generation later, the fest has found a more comfortable home at the suburban Rosemont 18 multiplex, where most of its big programs take place. This year the festival has even foregone its usual shows at Facets Cinematheque, leaving the Society for Arts in Jefferson Park as its sole remaining Chicago venue....

It feels like I just licked a toad.” That was the observation of a friend a few minutes after he sat down at Bar Biscay. He didn’t mean the food. He was referring to the oscillating lysergic energy of the room, in which different colored LED strips and floating tubes imperceptibly pulse from the ceiling and walls, and then somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly. A girl with kaleidoscope eyes....

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.

Raised in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., scott b. davis first became interested in photography in the early 90s when he was compelled to document the wilderness. Looking for places that led him off of the map and into spaces unexplored, he began to dive deep into history. By the mid-90s, davis was working with 19th-century photographic processes and formulas like platinum and palladium printing with large format cameras. The artist, looking for ways to be more physically involved in photography, decided to pick up this practice in order to fail more and try new things with his practice....

When I started volunteering at Odd Obsession Movies as a 23-year-old in early 2006, the store was in its first location on Halsted Street, sitting snugly in a basement storefront opposite the Steppenwolf Theatre. I discovered the store by accident before going to a play one evening, and after that, I began stopping in about once a week. I couldn’t resist the lure of movies that, until then, I’d only dreamed of watching: video works by Jean-Luc Godard never released on Region 1 DVD, features by lesser-known directors of the Japanese New Wave, hard-to-find cult classics like Stephanie Rothman’s The Velvet Vampire (1971) and John Byrum’s Inserts (1975), and experimental films by the likes of Andy Warhol, Pat O’Neill, and Rob Tregenza....

John Sturdy Radar Eyes Local live sound engineer and Anatomy of Habit bassist Kenny Rasmussen feels that people whose ages and schedules prohibit them from going to bars to see late-night shows should be able to enjoy live punk rock just like the rest of us. He took matters into his own hands: at the end of the month, on Sat 1/31, he kicks off his new live-music series, which welcomes three-band punk bills to Bridgeport’s Richard J....

J.B. Priestley’s 1945 chestnut, a staple of the modern theatrical canon, is not what anyone would call subtle. Set on the cusp of World War I, it focuses on the well-to-do Birlings, led by self-satisfied industrialist and politician Arthur, a man singularly devoted to protecting “the interests of capital” and pooh-poohing the burgeoning socialist ideal of “community and all that nonsense.” Into their swank ranks comes mysterious, hard-nosed Inspector Goole to inform them that a young woman’s just committed suicide and left a diary in which several of them are named....

Swerve Salon 1419 N. Wells 312-255-0255 swervesalon.com Runner-Up: Rev. Billy’s Chop Shop

Pinky Nail Sapphire Nail Salon Finalists: Color Box, Nail Palette

The Latest Sun Is Sinking Fast The films of Melika Bass seem to exist eerily out of time. This local artist, best known for her experimental feature Shoals, avoids onscreen details that might tie the action to any particular era, and because she typically shoots on 16-millimeter film, using only minimal lighting, her films even look as if they were made in the past. In her four-channel installation The Latest Sun Is Sinking Fast, exhibited at the Hyde Park Art Center from January through April, Bass uses her uncanny style to address the subject of spiritual contemplation....

78/52, which dissects and decodes the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), has received mostly glowing reviews from critics—which makes sense, given that it both validates cineastes’ obsessions and constitutes a fine piece of film criticism itself. Named for the 78 camera setups and 52 splices that Hitchcock employed for a sequence running about three minutes, the documentary feels like an Intro to Cinema Studies class taught by an engaging professor, both wonky and accessible....

Want a taste of a new website devoted to Chicago sports? Take this link to the Athletic Chicago, a website just launched by a couple of young business partners in San Francisco, Alex Mather and Adam Hansmann, but populated here by some familiar names in Chicago sportswriting. The founders have signed on Jon Greenberg, Scott Powers, and Sahadev Sharma, all of whom used to write for ESPN Chicago, which, says Greenberg in a hello note to readers, has evolved since it was launched in 2009 “into something pretty great....

“It’s a pretty terrible ingredient,” Parachute‘s Johnny Clark says of canned fruit cocktail, with which Lula Cafe‘s Sarah Rinkavage challenged him to create a dish. “It’s like school cafeteria [or] nursing-home food. There’s not much I can do with it.” He could taste the fruit cocktail in the finished product, he said, but it wasn’t bad. “It’s balanced, sweet and sour and salty.” If he made the dish again, he says, he’d use fresh fruit....

The best mixtapes are eclectic, showcasing a broad range of styles and artists and thus encouraging listeners to explore unfamiliar catalogs. This year Pitchfork booked so many acts from in and around Chicago that one song from each would fill a side of a 90-minute cassette, so I made a streamable mix for the occasion. All 12 artists have released music in the past year, and it’s almost all available on Spotify—the lone exception, the AACM Great Black Music Ensemble‘s Live at the Currency Exchange, Volume 1, can be purchased at their performances....

In a Track Record essay published just before American Pleasure Club dropped February’s A Whole Fucking Lifetime of This (Run for Cover), front man Sam Ray wrote about the process of changing the band’s name from Teen Suicide. In the piece he described the group’s effort to retain their fervent cult following while shedding that name, which they’d matured beyond—their decision to flood the Web with new material, a la Lil Wayne during the lead-up to Tha Carter III, was intended to help with the transition....

The 25th edition of the Black Harvest Film Festival, playing at the Gene Siskel Film Center all this month, boasts a robust lineup of titles that are wide-ranging in subject matter and ambitious in aims. The festival opens with “A Black Harvest Feast” (85 min.; Sat 8/3, 7 PM), a series of five new shorts commissioned by the Film Center, and closes with Spike Lee’s Crooklyn (114 min.; Thu 8/29, 6:30 PM), his 1994 ode to his family; Lee’s cowriter, sister Joie Lee, will be in attendance....

Ah, fall: a crisp breeze off the lake, a blush of crimson and gold in the trees, and the invigorating return of students to one of the largest college towns in the country—books, computers, masks, and hand sanitizer in tow. But, after a summer of vacillation, hybrid plans that combine online instruction with in-person classes are what most schools settled on. We should not just be saying we’re going to follow what the government says, Schaffer argued....

The Chicago comedy scene is filled with stories of men who abuse their power and use it to harass and assault their female colleagues and students. Brian Posen, the founder and creative director of Stage 773 and a former teacher at Columbia College and Second City, has figured in some of these stories and, more recently, a social media campaign instigated by a former assistant who cataloged his offensive comments and behavior under the hashtag #boycottstage773....

Earlier this year there was an outpouring of stories from female comics both local and national about the sexism, harassment, and abuse they’d faced in the comedy scene. Through social media, personal blogs, and word of mouth, women united to shed light on experiences that took place everywhere from small open mikes to the largest comedy theaters in the country. But such accounts shouldn’t overshadow the real reason we need to be paying attention to these women: they’re great comedians who should be noticed for their talent and drive rather than because of scandal....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Monday, March 21, 2016. Chicago’s police misconduct bill is disturbing amid financial crisis Chicago has been plagued by serious debt and poor credit ratings over the past few years, and the enormous sum of $662 million that the city has had to pay out for police misconduct since 2004 hasn’t helped the situation. How did it get to this point? “If you were seen going after police, you were seen as being for crime,” alderman Howard Brookins Jr....