History books of the future might not mention this, but the City Council meeting that gave the Obama Presidential Center final permission to build in Jackson Park included votes by Freddy Krueger, Prince, and a trio of giant animal heads. The speakers were ardent, the officials distracted. Whereupon—like a bolt of lightning on a dark and stormy night—rules were suspended, a roll-call vote was taken, and both OPC ordinances were resoundingly passed, 48 to zero....

A lot of the history of brewing is the history of regulatory headaches,” says brewer John Laffler of Off Color. It’s a legacy that continues today: Laffler faced bureaucratic setbacks while brewing QingMing, a collaboration beer with the Field Museum inspired by brewing techniques and ingredients from ancient China. For example, because there’s evidence that hemp was used as a filtration mechanism, Off Color was planning to replicate the technique. “We talked to the feds and they were like, ‘If you get this documentation that all these hemp seeds don’t have any THC [you can do it],’ ” Laffler says....

“The housing market is ridiculously slim for those of us in a chair,” says Tovar, who’s spent months searching for alternative housing while paying more than half of her social security disability income toward rent since the CHA lowered its voucher payouts to her in 2016. Through a series of emergency petitions to CHA and the Department of Housing and Urban Development this past year, Tovar has managed to remain at the Harbor Drive apartment on a month-to-month agreement....

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Nostalgia can blind us, so that we remember things as way better than they actually were. Riot Fest capitalizes on that phenomenon year after year by enlisting a handful of bands to play their best-known records front to back. I just went back and listened to all seven of this year’s albums, and I’m here to tell you how they’ve aged—no nostalgic bias allowed. Fear The Record (1982) Sunday 2:25 PM, Rise Stage...

There is a rule in journalism that it takes three of a kind to make a trend. In the past two weeks there have been four anti-Semitic incidents in Chicago: the smashing of windows and the scrawling of swastikas on the front of the Chicago Loop Synagogue, the carving of a swastika on a bench inside the Illinois Holocaust Museum, anti-Semitic and racist graffiti painted inside Saint Cornelius School in Jefferson Park, and a bomb threat to a suburban Jewish community center....

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Courtney Barnett It’s Presidents Day, which means some of you get to kick back and take the day off. Even if you don’t have the day off, there’s plenty of ways to celebrate—specifically, plenty of great concerts, such as Justin Timberlake at the United Center and Ultra Bide at LiveWire Lounge. “Twenty-five-year-old Melbourne singer Courtney Barnett unfurls the lines to her wordy songs with an apathy that belies their sharpness,” writes Peter Margasak....

Dale Reince Braid On Saturday Chicago-via-Champaign outfit Braid coheadline a show at Double Door with Smoking Popes; the influential second-wave emo band is preparing to release its first full-length in 16 years, No Coast, and Saturday’s set is the only show Braid has booked in the area before the album comes out. No Coast is a high-energy, matured take on emo, and its sleekly produced tunes are ready-made for summer evenings spent staring at the setting sun....

The first moment I knew Tim Fitzgerald would be a great guitarist was at a place in Lincoln Park called the Jazz Bulls. He wasn’t one yet. It was 1990, and he was a teenager at an afternoon jam session for a local jazz teacher’s students, each of them taking tentative little solos. The guitar he played was a solid-body Martin. It was an awkwardly heavy instrument, and I knew well what it could do because it had once been mine....

Vic Mensa has an affinity for punk. You can hear it in the ferocious tone he brings to his songs when his target is a lethal racist cop or anyone else who deserves his righteous rage—and his clothes flat-out scream it. Maybe you remember him wearing a Bad Brains T-shirt at Pitchfork a couple years ago? If not, you can find plenty of other examples in his Instagram feed—right at the top he’s posted a shot of an LA gig where he’s got on a Dead Kennedys shirt....

Suitcase of Love and Shame On Monday at 7 PM Constellation, the northwest-side arts venue, will host a screening of Suitcase of Love and Shame (2013), a documentary feature compiled from 60 hours of reel-to-reel tape that director Jane Gillooly found in a suitcase she purchased on eBay. Those tapes were recorded sometime in the 1960s by a midwestern woman and the man with whom she had an adulterous love affair....

There’s plenty to do this week. Here’s some of what we recommend: Tue 1/31: Aymar Jean Christian hosts #OpenTVTonight at the Museum of Contemporary Art (220 E. Chicago), featuring screenings of pilots from upcoming webseries—including Brown Girls, Brujos, and Afternoon Snatch—and talks with the artists who created them. 6 PM Thu 2/2: Southern rock band Drive-By Truckers play at the Vic (3145 N. Sheffield). Peter Margasak writes of their new album, American Band: “Pulling off this kind of album isn’t easy, but the gritty melodies and stomping rhythms only enhance the righteous messages that transcend particular moments in American history, even as they unmistakably spring from the present....

The Reader’s archive is vast and varied, going back to 1971. Every week in Archive Dive, we’ll dig through and bring up some finds. Is a Chicago without police a possibility? In the 2016 article “Abolish the police? Organizers say it’s less crazy than it sounds.” Reader staff writer Maya Dukmasova explored the history of abolitionism, spoke with local activists fighting for change, and reported the Chicago Police Department’s response (or lack thereof) to the movement....

October 25-November 9, chicagohumanities.org In a different sort of world we’d grow up swapping cards with pictures and fun facts about our favorite economists, reading comic books about the adventures of physicists and anthropologists, and hanging up centerfolds of Paris Review interview subjects in our lockers. We’d throw parties—with themed cocktails!—to celebrate the announcement of the Nobel Prize laureates and wait in line all night outside bookstores (or at least sitting in front of our computers hitting “refresh”) just so we could get tickets to readings....