A Latin American restaurant features a special three-course menu for two. Chocolate-covered strawberries and champagne are included with the meal. $60
A topical sketch show by Butch LaRue. $15
Logan Square stalwarts Saki and I Am Logan Square join forces for Copyright Basics, an overview of copyright laws with IALS director Cara Dehnert Huffman and a local entertainment-law specialist. —Joey Jachowski and Sam Worley
Editor Wendy Wolf discusses the late Manning Marable's book Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention.
Sacco discusses his latest graphic novel, Footnotes in Gaza.
Austen (Roctober magazine) presents Flying Saucers Rock 'n' Roll: Conversations With Unjustly Obscure Rock 'n' Soul Eccentrics.
For the Reader's Chicagoans column, writer Anne Ford switches into oral-historian mode, seeking out interesting characters and letting us hear from them directly. She goes further off the beaten path for her new book Peaceful Places Chicago: 119 Tranquil Sites in the Windy City and Beyond, which she'll read from tonight. —Sam Worley
Overton reads from her memoir, Good in a Crisis.
Chicago State University Aquaponics Center director Emmanuel Pratt lectures for this Archeworks series. RSVP requested. $5 suggested donation, $5 seniors and students
Like the Velvet Underground before them, defunct Georgia indie-rock band Neutral Milk Hotel released a handful of albums that had a very small, localized impact upon their initial release but which have since gone on to provide a stylistic and vaguely philosophical blueprint for an untold number of groups around the world. The albums—especially 1998's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea—have influenced the masses threefold. Sonically they've inspired a kitchen-sink approach to instrumentation, no doubt including more than a few actual kitchen sinks; thematically, a slightly skewed, childlike optimism; and sartorially, any number of attempts at looking like an old-fashioned workman. Devotees taking these things to an annoying extreme have become a constant presence in the indie world, a testament to the power of the original music, which was unlike anything anyone else was doing at the time and remains as stirring and gorgeous as ever. Reclusive former NMH leader Jeff Mangum went off the grid following Aeroplane's release, and this is one of his first forays into public performance since then—in some corners the anticipation surrounding his reappearance is downright messianic. —Miles Raymer Andrew Rieger, Laura Carter, and Scott Spillane open.
Writer-activist Gloria Steinem is the guest speaker for this Columbia College series. Event is full.
"Where good writing and good beer mix." The featured readers at this edition are Julia Borcherts, Lillian Huang Cummins, Lauryn Allison Lewis, Dustin Monk, and Margie Skelly. 21+.
Jen Moore, Laura Goldstein, and Gus Rose are the featured readers at this outing. 21+.