There’s a noticeably chiller vibe when I show up to Douglas Park for day 3 of Riot Fest 2019. If Friday was like the final moments of the last day […]

I’ve been a Dashboard Confessional fan since I was 12, listening to their albums in my room as a moody teenager, door shut, scribbling their sad girl lyrics onto notebooks […]

There’s a thoughtful core to Deborah Zoe Laufer’s Be Here Now, the story of a bitter, cynical woman afflicted with headaches and seizures that leave her seeing the world as one […]

It was a historic occasion when George H. W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton all came together for Richard “Tricky Dick” Nixon’s 1994 funeral. We’ll […]

When The Blair Witch Project came out in 1999 it was a phenomenon, spawning a huge cut following and practically inventing a new type of horror film—the found footage horror. […]

Way back in the day, somewhere on the internet, I came across a list of things that made someone “badass.” It was filled with mostly ridiculous, hyper-masculine achievements—stuff like “fought […]

The Mass in b-minor is often described as Johann Sebastian Bach’s valedictory masterpiece. It certainly received a masterly treatment by the Music of the Baroque Chorus and Orchestra, whose season-opening […]

If he didn’t have family back east, Joe Pug would live with us in the Windy City. “They’re fucking up shit in the rest of the country. Chicago’s still got […]

These days, psychedelia has crept back into music like it never left the ‘60s and ‘70s. We have Tame Impala playing arenas. We have Drugdealer sounding best on vinyl. We […]

My second day at Riot Fest was another one of firsts—first time that I used the port-o-potty at the festival, first time I rode a divvy bike into oncoming traffic, […]

If you need an actor to carry your show on her shoulders, might I recommend the talents of one Janet Ulrich Brooks? Last year, she dominated Timeline Theatre’s Master Class as opera […]

I’ll get this out of the way up front. I’m a Riot Fest virgin. In fact I have only been to one festival in my life, when I covered Pitchfork […]