I won’t pretend to know much about Renaissance vocal music, but I will say that encountering Divine Theatre: Sacred Motets by Giaches de Wert (Harmonia Mundi), the new album by veteran British vocal ensemble Stile Antico, certainly has me challenging my ignorance. The recording features the group bringing its polyphonic precision to the sacred motets of Flemish composer Giaches de Wert, who spent most of his life living in Italy and whose fame stems primarily from his madrigals....

The pipes burst upstairs the other day. And so soon after we moved in. We shouldn’t be surprised, I suppose. For better or worse, and all. But still. What started as a creeping water stain soon became a gentle rainfall, and now our home is starting to bloom. There’s moss and flowers and tiny ferns everywhere we look. The only thing we had was the couch. It was a mid-century, one I had found at an estate sale....

Michael Jarecki/Sun-Times Media Papa Mell offered some revealing observations about how Chicago politics really works at the Hideout earlier this week. If I were Mayor Rahm, I’d say that our opening-night gig at the Hideout was such a smashing success that Mick Dumke and I should replace David Letterman when he retires. Videographer Peter Holderness was on hand to film the event. And he captured some classic moments, like Waguespack explaining the city’s strip-club law, Mell describing the pain he feels in his ass, and Moreno defending his proposed ban on plastic bags....

Aimee Levitt An almond butter and strawberry-vanilla jam sandwich with peach lemonade You could argue that the appearance of Beurrage, a Viennese-style bakery, represents the further gentrification of Pilsen, and you could also argue that it’s ridiculous to pay $5.50 for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, “artisanal” or not. The counterargument is there is always room anywhere for a good croissant and, anyway, Beurrage itself is a product of Pilsen: it began two years ago as a booth in the neighborhood farmer’s market....

I’d hoped to make it through my life without hearing a host of A Prairie Home Companion break out in a rap, but with the new Punch Brothers album, All Ashore (Nonesuch) that desire has been shattered. Toward the end of the second song, “The Angel of Doubt,” mandolinist, singer, and inheritor of Garrison Keillor’s maligned throne Chris Thile switches from a sweet falsetto to a wooden, hopelessly ofay rap cadence....

Kevin Hart and Ice Cube in Ride Along “The death of Hollywood is Mel Brooks and special effects,” Joseph L. Mankiewicz once said. “If Mel Brooks had come up in my day he wouldn’t have qualified to be a busboy.” As much as Brooks makes me laugh, I understand why Mankiewicz singled him out as a target for bile. The writer-director of A Letter to Three Wives approached film comedy with the same literacy and formal ambition he brought to social drama (some of his early producing credits included Fritz Lang’s Fury and Frank Borzage’s Three Comrades)....

Susan Messer McBride was wiping clay off her hands when she began talking about feminism in the age of Donald Trump. In the past McBride, an artist and educator for decades, wasn’t very politically motivated. But that’s changed since the election. The Chicago show was one of more than 40 that have taken place since January of this year—the first in New York City—with dozens more planned across the U.S. and Europe, according to the Nasty Women Exhibition website....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Tuesday, April 4, 2017. Chicago “Dreamers” consider whether to stay in the U.S. or leave with deported family members The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program allowed undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. by their parents as children to work and study legally in the U.S. With President Donald Trump threatening to crackdown on undocumented immigrants, many local “Dreamers” are worried about their parents being deported and facing a difficult choice: stay in the U....

When I think of smell and art, I think of the vaguely astringent and gluey odor of the Art Institute. I have no idea what the source is, though I suspect it has more to do with displays and cleaning than with the actual art itself. But why shouldn’t we appreciate scent as an art the way we appreciate sound and vision and touch and even taste? (What is Next anyway but an ever-changing gallery with the art on plates instead of the wall?...

My parents immigrated with my older sister to the United States from Hong Kong in 1981. Soon after, I was born in Flint, Michigan, where I spent most of my childhood. There were a handful of Chinese families in Flint, and it was a close-knit group at one point, but it wasn’t until I moved to Chicago in 2009 at the age of 27 that I was able to familiarize myself with a larger Chinese community....

This year the Gene Siskel Film Center presents the 20th edition of its annual European Union Film Festival, with Chicago premieres of more than 60 new features. If you’re familiar with the fest, you know it’s one of the most vibrant and eclectic film gatherings the city has to offer, and this year’s edition includes new work by Olivier Assayas, Icíar Bollaín, Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Dorris Dörrie, Bruno Dumont, François Ozon, Carlos Saura, Albert Serra, Lone Scherfig, and Thomas Lilti....

A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. The prolificacy of Future Drug-addled emotional Auto-Tune addict Future might be the hottest, trippiest rapper out there right now. His Free Bricks collaboration with Gucci Mane was the perfect way to close out 2016, and the two full-length records he released in the span of seven days last month were a really monumental way to kick off this year....

Ed Paschke almost never took a vacation. The six days a week he spent at his Rogers Park studio painting the vibrant, haunting portraits that were his trademark was vacation enough, Paschke’s son Marc once said. So special was the cluttered room on Howard Street that the artist called it the alchemist’s lair. After Paschke’s death at age 65 in 2004, Marc meticulously photographed the studio and carefully packed up its contents, with the hope that a gallery might one day re-create the place his father, a key Chicago Imagist, most loved to be....

In the final moments of Water by the Spoonful, the 2012 Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Quiara Alegría Hudes, Elliot, a veteran of the Iraq war, stands in a Puerto Rican rain forest. He’s about to spread the ashes of his aunt, the woman who raised him after his crack-addicted mother surrendered custody. Then he gets a text message: Elliot’s father has sold his house. This dramatic inertia is even more pronounced in a parallel story line involving a second set of characters, a quartet of recovering addicts who communicate with each other through an Internet forum for “crackheads....

Lou Mallozzi and Douglas Ewart are both seasoned interdisciplinary artists who approach sound and music from a multitude of perspectives. Mallozzi, who founded Experimental Sound Studios (ESS) over 30 years ago, most recently exhibited a site-specific installation at gallery Sector 2337 that’s composed of two works, one of which involves sound and its interaction in space. That’s a common thread for Mallozzi no matter which primary medium he’s working in, but while his installation centered around barely audible sounds in a room with subtle visual manipulations, his performances often have him expressing another side of his explorations, often using turntables and electronics to produce twitchy organic figures that boldly take up the room....

My first week in Chicago, in February 1995, I was driving around exploring the city when I turned my girlfriend’s juddery little red Hyundai down Fulton Market between two delivery trucks backed up against opposite-facing loading docks. I was slowly squeezing my way through when around the corner whipped a forklift piloted by a wild-eyed berserker with Lemmy-length hair and a bloodied white work coat who stopped on only the briefest beat before hitting the gas, well aware that I was already putting the car in reverse and getting the fuck out of his way....

It probably seemed like a gloomy joke when Phil Ochs put an image of his own tombstone on the cover of his 1969 album Rehearsal for Retirement with an inscription that read: “Born El Paso, Texas; Died Chicago, IL, 1968.” Certainly, Ochs didn’t perish. Nor was he one of the hundreds of anti-war protesters hurt in the ensuing melees with police and the National Guard that week. What he and many of his peers in the New Left instead suffered was a kind of spiritual death....

Few directors could say as much with as little as Eric Rohmer. Consider the first emotional climax of A Summer’s Tale (1996): with just two actors, a crew of six, and a hillside trail overlooking a beach, Rohmer creates a sequence of sly humor, slow-burning eroticism, and timeless behavioral insight. Gaspard (Melvil Poupard), a postgraduate student on vacation, has spent about a week in the resort town of Dinard, waiting to be joined by the woman he’s been casually dating....

“I can’t wait for this to be done,” Charna Halpern says. “I’m so exhausted.” The matriarch of the iO Theater is hurriedly walking through what will soon be the remarkable new home of her renowned improv comedy enterprise. But right now, it’s a construction site. Halpern pauses for a moment, scans the dusty floors and plywood piled around the room, and exhales deeply. As a performer, Smith is impressed with the size of the designated space for the green room—and with the bathrooms, of which Halpern is particularly proud....

Michael Gebert Readying the buffet at Khan BBQ Some years ago I was visiting my sister and her family in D.C., and we decided to eat at an Afghan restaurant near the Pentagon that she knew—it was popular, I think, among both immigrants and soldiers who had done tours there. Although we could order as soon as we arrived, we found out we wouldn’t be allowed to actually eat for another half hour....