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Since 2011, Chicago-based experimental radio platform Radius has broadcast some 600 episodes of far-out sound art, both live and prerecorded. These days it’s hosted on WIIT 88.9 FM and streams online at theradius.us, and at 7 PM on Friday, July 29, local musician Anthony Janas will perform one of the series’ most ambitious pieces yet. In Water Has Nothing to Say and Neither Do I, Janas will perform on a treated sailboat—basically a 25-foot daysailer outfitted with hydrophones and contact microphones, the sounds of which he’ll filter through a modular synthesizer as he sails from Adler Planetarium to 31st Street Beach....

When Lili Trifilio shakes off the cold in a Wicker Park coffee shop in the middle of a January snowstorm, her asymmetrical pink hair feels beamed in from a sunnier dimension. Since Trifilio’s band Beach Bunny evolved from a solo project into a regular group, their heartfelt, punky indie pop has built a devoted audience so quickly that they’ve barely been able to keep up. Trifilio and Vogrich began writing together, forming the short-lived duo Fingers x Crossed....

The Reader’s archive is vast and varied, going back to 1971. Every day in Archive Dive, we’ll dig through and bring up some finds. For years, the “Our Town” section of the Reader profiled ordinary Chicagoans doing ordinary things. You’d read about it for the way the writing brought them to life. Neal Pollack’s 2000 “Coffee Club Closes,” is a perfect example—some 2,300 words on Don Selle, the crotchety Rogers Park cafe owner who’s dying to get rid of his customers, shut down his business, and ________....

Kai Zan Runner-Up: Coast

Conceptual artist Natasha Marin’s Black Imagination creates a safe haven for Black folx during a time when it is needed more than ever. As Black communities continue to be disproportionately impacted by COVID-19, Black Imagination is not only a book but also a project: an invitation to acknowledge and extend beyond the limitations of our current reality by envisioning a future that centers our wishes, healing, and dreams. My typically salty teenager suggests that getting there is the hard part....

Based on Vicki Baum’s 1929 novel and its 1932 Hollywood film adaptation, this 1989 musical focuses on a group of people staying at a swank Berlin hotel in 1928. Among them are a handsome young German baron in debt to a gangster; an aging Russian ballerina on yet another farewell tour; the dancer’s devoted secretary, secretly in love with her employer; a young typist who dreams of Hollywood stardom; a businessman on the brink of bankruptcy; a mortally ill Jewish accountant who has cashed in his life’s savings in order to spend his final days in luxurious living; and a cynical doctor, a morphine-addicted veteran of World War I....

Ashland Tire & Auto Albany Park Auto Clinic Finalists: Joe’s Expert Auto, Bucaro Brothers Auto Care, A&A Auto Repair, Reliable Auto Repair Center, B&L Automotive Repairs, Nal’s Auto Repair, Marvin’s Auto Service, VFC Engineering

Urban Kayaks

City Hall Bridgeport Arts Center Finalists: Salvage One, Revolution Brewery, City Winery, The Ivy Room

The Shithole shitholehq.com Runner-Up: The Dojo

Ramone Hulet was up late when the idea hit him. Jones and Hulet’s extensive experience in the film industry revealed a need for a clearer path to collaborate, recruit, and hire other Black people. Hulet’s recent work includes the 2020 Candyman collaboration between Nia DaCosta and Jordan Peele, while Jones can be seen on Fox’s Empire and in her comedy webseries, The Right Swipe. The Black In Film database has existed for less than a month and is already making a difference in the lives of Black creatives....

Bojan Milicevic’s hometown is best known for two things: thick, sweet, and spicy ancho-like red adjvarka peppers, which blanket exterior house walls as they dry each autumn, and September’s Roštiljijada, “barbecue week,” when the main drag is occupied by hundreds of amateur and professional grillers firing up everything from cevapcici to uštipak, to whole hogs and lambs, only upstaged by the record-holding pljeskavica, the world’s largest Serbian burger. It’s not a foam-and-forceps situation, but rarely do most Balkan restaurants roast Slagel Farm chickens, drizzle charred scallion oil over feta-stuffed peppers, or develop a Nashville-style hot chicken sausage with ground ajvarka, let alone offer a cocktail menu built around different Serbian fruit brandies....

Q: I’m a 26-year-old cis queer woman. My best friend has identified publicly as asexual for the past two years. She constantly talks about how since she doesn’t “need” sex, this means she is asexual. She does have sex, however, and she enjoys it, which I know isn’t disqualifying. But she also actively seeks out sex partners and sex. But, again, she insists that because she doesn’t “need” sex the way she presumes the rest of us do, she is asexual....

Simon’s Estelle’s Finalists: AliveOne, Montrose Saloon

Back in 2012, just as Black Ensemble Theater was moving into its brand-new home in Uptown, the theater’s founder and CEO, Jackie Taylor, gave an interview to the Reader‘s Tony Adler. “I always knew that the theater company had to be more than just a name, it had to have an asset, it had to have a foundation,” Taylor told Adler. “Owning your own space, having your own theater solidifies you in a way that nothing else can....