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Much like Birds Watching, Jenny Kendler’s permanent sculpture on the 606 depicting one hundred eyes of birds threatened by extinction, the interdisciplinary artist keeps her eyes wide open to the impact people have on the environment. Her work focuses on the relationship between human beings and the natural world—especially concerning biodiversity loss and climate change. When it comes to the fashion industry, she doesn’t turn a blind eye either. “The garment industry is responsible for 8 percent of warming emissions, making it a bigger contributor to the climate crisis than the aviation industry,” she says....

On his new album, Molecular, Brooklyn saxophonist James Brandon Lewis showcases a vision that’s both microscopic and immense. In the liner notes he describes a compositional model that draws inspiration from the structural components of DNA, comparing the shape of the music to a double helix: “Within a single melodic line emerges a counter line of varied rhythms, pitches, and harmony,” he writes. That image also references the way Lewis’s compositions weave together a world of disparate sources....

ARTIST: Walker Tkl SHOW: Chairlift at Double Door on Sat 4/2 MORE INFO: walkertkl.com

Bounce back from the weekend of family time by going out into the world. There’s plenty to do this weekend, here’s some of what we recommend: Tue 11/29: Filmmaker and author John Waters brings his sacrilegious one-man show, A John Water Christmas, to Thalia Hall (1227 W. 18th). 9 PM Thu 12/1: Reader contributor Ted McClelland stops by the Book Cellar (4736 N. Lincoln) to discuss his book How to Speak Midwestern, which focuses on the accents, turns of phrase, and speech patterns of middle America....

Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago.

Music Box Theatre 

Speaking to a standing-room-only group of more than 100 rapt Second City students in mid-January, Odenkirk explains why the hostility was so strong in 1990 that Second City matriarch and longtime producer Joyce Sloane had to step in on his behalf. “Growing up, show business seemed so far away. Second City seemed far away. It freaked me out. It was all so intimidating. The whole business is so scary and distant and such a mystery....

In September 2017, Muhammad Habib Ismail joined fellow Rohingya Muslims on a march through downtown Chicago. The march, organized by the Rohingya Cultural Center, was to protest the Myanmar military’s campaign of rape, arson, and killing of Rohingya in northern Rakhine State, which UN investigators found to have been carried out “with genocidal intent.” In Malaysia, where refugees are classified together with undocumented immigrants, Ismail’s family did not have access to public services or legal employment....

God knows what Victor, a hapless English professor holed up in his temporary university office, is up to at the beginning of Neo-Futurist Lily Mooney’s new play. Pants around his ankles, he kneads his stomach with a pillow and then his fists, grunting noncommittally as though caught between masturbation and vocal warm-ups. In barges Mooney, calling herself Herself but also admitting (eventually) to being the evening’s playwright, coy, detached, vaguely threatening, alternately insisting that Victor has failed her and that he must read her paper on Frankenstein—or more accurately, on Mary Shelley’s introduction to Frankenstein, since she acknowledges she never read the novel....

Q: This is another request for a kinky neologism. How about those of us who like the idea of our significant other having sex with somebody else but who aren’t into full-on cuckold-style humiliation? “Cuckold” implies a level of subordination that just isn’t my thing, and “hotwifing,” besides sounding incredibly sleazy, assumes that it’s a couple that is opposite sex and married, and the guy is only interested in watching....

Over the summer a friend sat me down and had me watch the documentary For Grace. She had just visited Grace, the three-Michelin-star restaurant in the West Loop that’s featured in the film, to shoot a video with owner and head chef Curtis Duffy for Escoffier Culinary School’s online program and was in awe of the food, the restaurant, and the man behind it all. As someone who’s more likely to be found eating pizza at a dive bar than sitting for a multicourse meal at the most expensive restaurant in Chicago, watching the movie was the closest I ever thought I’d get to this experience....

WestEnd

Approximately 400 people gathered outside the Chicago Police Department Thursday night in a Black Lives Matter march and demonstration around Fuller Park, honoring Alton Sterling and Philando Castile and condemning police brutality. Protesters heading to a @Chicago_Police station on the Southside. #PhilandoCastile #AltonSterling #ChiCallToAction pic.twitter.com/kxR7FGvShj — Justin Madden (@IAmJustinMadden) July 8, 2016 Both men were African-American—something they had in common with growing list of men and women shot and killed by police in cities across the nation, including Laquan McDonald, Ronnie Johnson, and Rekia Boyd, all fatally shot by Chicago police....

Monday January 18 commemorates Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and there are several ways to participate in our yearly tribute to one of the architects of the civil rights movement. MLK Day has been observed in all 50 states since the year 2000, making the Public Enemy song “By The Time I Get to Arizona” a piece of history (but in this writer’s opinion, a historical jam). Studio One of Jamaica’s Jamaica All Stars, streaming on Bandcamp....

Sue Kwong We’re still two rounds away from declaring the two ultimate winners of the Greatest Chicago Book tournament—the Greatest Book itself and the Reader reader who best predicted the judges’ decisions and will get a trip to Mexico to celebrate his or her fine taste (or clairvoyance)—but we’re pleased to announce that we have Reader reader winners of rounds one and two. More than 400 people entered the contest, but these two readers were able to successfully predict the judges’ rulings in their rounds and survive an arduous selection process (a random drawing from the e-mail addresses of other readers who also made correct predictions) to win $50 gift certificates from Barbara’s Bookstore....

Update: To help slow the spread of COVID-19, this show has been postponed until a date to be determined in the future. Contact point of purchase for refund or exchange information. In January 2018, Berlin-based dance producer, vocalist, and composer Laurel Halo tweeted that she’d written a score for Possessed, a documentary by Rob Schröder and Metahaven, a Dutch design collective that’s branched out into film since forming in 2007. Metahaven’s work focuses on the dystopian aspects of our present lives, and those themes are central to Possessed, which navigates a wide range of technological horrors—some are obviously frightening (facial recognition software), and others are so quotidian we engage with them almost thoughtlessly (YouTube makeup tutorials)....

CumbiaSazo 1572 N. Milwaukee 773-489-3160 doubledoor.com Hosted by Double Door every fourth Saturday of the month, CumbiaSazo is part live music performance, part dance instruction, and part art exhibit, all dedicated to the musical styles of cumbia and tropical bass. Both genres—rooted in cross-cultural music traditions from South America, Africa, and Spain—continue to grow in popularity as they expand beyond mostly Latin American audiences. CumbiaSazo reflects cumbia’s and tropical bass’s reach in Chicago—while the event isn’t new by a long shot (it’s been around since 2011, practically unheard of in the nightlife world), it’s recently become a fixture in the scene that caters to younger crowds....