Chicago police superintendent Garry McCarthy came ready Thursday night for the throng of protesters who, as they have for the past few months, packed the Chicago Police Board’s meeting to demand detective Dante Servin be fired. Still, that did not satisfy a litany of speakers who told Police Board members and McCarthy that a decision to dismiss Servin had dragged on long enough. Servin, who was off-duty at the time of the 2012 shooting, fired his gun over his shoulder while inside his car....

State rep Lou Lang remembers thinking the night of the election that people with a stake in Illinois’s medicinal marijuana pilot program—including cultivators, dispensaries, and patients—had a lot to fear from a Trump presidency and its promises of “law and order.” Spicer also assured the public that Trump “understands the pain and suffering that many people go through who are facing especially terminal diseases, and the comfort that some of these drugs, including medical marijuana, can bring to them....

Whenever the Spanish artist Jaume Plensa is in Chicago, the first place he stops is the northeast corner of Michigan and Monroe. When he arrives there this week, it will be to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Millennium Park and his famed Crown Fountain—and to attend the openings of a pair of exhibits of his head sculptures in the park and at Richard Gray Gallery. Over the phone from Germany, where two solo shows of his work are being held this summer, Plensa describes the urge to visit Crown Fountain as a sort of impulsive pilgrimage of reassurance....

This Chicago blackened death-metal outfit takes its name from an evil Malay spirit, the vengeful vampiric ghost of either a stillborn baby or a woman who died in childbirth. To embody this nightmarish inspiration, front woman Arelys Jimenez—a horror buff and taxidermy enthusiast—dons terrifying, gruesome makeup and props for the band’s performances. In 2016, Matianak dropped a solid two-song EP, Enochian Ritual, and this May they released their first full-length, Non Compos Mentis....

La Grange native Josie Dunne muscled her way onto the stages of local bars and venues at age 13. Four years later she signed a deal with Atlantic, and spent her final high school years traveling back and forth between suburban Chicago and Nashville while finessing her craft and writing for well-known musicians such as Kelly Clarkson (who passed on a song written by Dunne) and crossover social-media star Jacob Sartorius (who recorded “Chapstick,” cowritten by Dunne)....

As you probably know, rabbits are running wild all over Chicago right now. If you haven’t seen them, then you must live in a high-rise facing the lake. Summer is the time when rabbits are born and begin their short but happy lives eating, fucking, and sleeping all the time. They’re everywhere. But when the weather gets cold, they’re smart enough to go someplace warm and wait it out. The first thing that needs to be addressed is the $38 crudite platter, a presentation that seems designed to foment divisiveness....

J. Crocker/Wikimedia Commons Six months after Co-Prosperity Sphere hosted a celebration of local artist and filmmaker Tom Palazzolo, the experimental Bridgeport cultural center is teaming up with Palazzolo again for “Picasso and the Mayor: The Chicago Picasso on 16-millimeter,” a program of two documentaries about the famous sculpture at Daley Plaza. Both works, screening from archival prints, were made in 1967, the year they were unveiled. The event takes place this Thursday at 7 PM....

Nocturama, Bertrand Bonello’s arty French thriller about a coordinated terror attack in Paris, wrapped production just before ISIL staged its horrifying November 2015 assault on multiple targets in the city, claiming 130 lives. The ISIL attacks—four bombings and four deadly shooting sprees, including the massacre of 89 people at a rock concert—make the movie seem tame by comparison. In Nocturama ten young radicals execute a wave of assassinations and bombings, but there are no mass civilian casualties....

Gossip Wolf hears that Cobra Lounge booker Nick Athanasopoulos is moving back to his hometown of Detroit: “I’m heading over there to start a little business with a friend,” he says. Riot Fest‘s Mike Petryshyn and his team will take over booking at Cobra, continuing the festival’s long relationship with the club—Cobra Lounge owner Sean McKeough cofounded Riot Fest, and Athanasopoulos works for Riot Fest too. Petryshyn and company will debut as Cobra Lounge’s booker the first week in December, in part to celebrate McKeough’s new brewery, All Rise....

Michael Gebert Tony Tzoubris at Ivy’s When Hot Doug’s was in its first bloom of world-historical fame, I often wondered why, in a city full of hot dog stands, almost no one else seemed to be following in the footsteps of the only hot dog stand with a line wrapped around its building. Wouldn’t it be worth adding a few specialty sausages with exotic toppings and charging $6 instead of $1....

It’s been a few years since Body/Head, the unapologetically rude guitar duo of Kim Gordon and Bill Nace, dropped Coming Apart, a seething debut where slate-gray chords, strangulated single-note flurries, and clouds of viscous feedback commingle in carefully sculpted environments that are usually punctuated by the former’s pregnant whispers, potent shouts, and numbing incantations. Late last year they dropped a follow-up, No Waves: Live at the Big Ears Festival (Matador), which was recorded in 2014 at the eclectic experimental-music extravaganza in Knoxville....

Playwright David Henry Hwang provides ample reasons to dislike his 1988 Tony-winning smash, M. Butterfly. Director Charles Newell, in his confused, miscast revival for Court Theatre, provides a few more. Hwang’s play, based on a true story, focuses on former French diplomat Rene Gallimard, rotting in a Paris prison and reliving his long, scandalous affair with Song Liling—aka Butterfly—a Peking opera star and cross-dressing spy who uses her intimacy with Gallimard to gather inside information about America’s involvement in Vietnam for her Chinese Communist handlers....

In our posteverything world it’s hard to envision the current model of a New York-style artistic vagabond—a creative who had a bohemian childhood and found ways to connect the detritus of the past with a forward-looking present. Singer Odetta Hartman offers one such version on her recently released second album, Old Rockhounds Never Die (Northern Spy), a ragged amalgam of folk, singer-songwriter confessionals, electronic beats, jazz phrasing, and more. On “Cowboy Song” she inhabits the hobo lifestyle, humorously singing about a cast of characters she’s met riding the rails (“I met a monk / His name was Mark / It had been three months since he last talked”) over a charming ramshackle groove layered with banjo, fiddle, and sudden low-end bass tones....

Supersludgy Arizona three-piece Goya open their third full-length, Harvester of Bongloads (Opoponax), with the 20-minute, three-part gauntlet drop “Omen: I. Strange Geometry. II. Fade Away, III. Life Disintegrates.” They’ve always wanted to be an heir to the (dope) throne of Electric Wizard in their lighter moments and Sleep when they plan to bring it way, way, way down, and this record represents their strongest journey through sluggish lava yet. What really proves rewarding for long-endurance listening is the gradually unfolding layers of texture, and rather than just slowly churning down-tuned earth, Goya offer a whole trip’s worth of psychedelic warble and warp with rhythm and fuzz....

Trombonist Jacob Garchik has long been one of the more fascinating figures on New York’s improvised music scene, a terrific musician with a fertile imagination and unbridled curiosity. He’s become a trusted collaborator of the Kronos Quartet, creating dazzling arrangements of music from all around the world for the string quartet. For his 2012 recording The Heavens: The Atheist Gospel Trombone Album he contributed up to a dozen parts through overdubbing, creating a kind of one-man Brass Fantasy larded with rich counterpoint....

In 2007, when the contents of Vivian Maier’s storage lockers were sold off at a Portage Park auction house, Ron Slattery was one of three major winning bidders for boxes that turned out to contain the life’s work of a remarkable photographer. In April 2012, however, Slattery turned 56 of his Vivian Maier photographs over to John Corbett and Jim Dempsey’s much-loved Wicker Park gallery, Corbett vs. Dempsey, for an exhibit and sale that opened in June, ran through December 2012—and culminated in a lawsuit in which Slattery is seeking damages of more than $2 million....

The Night of the Hunter In this week’s paper, J.R. Jones recommends the new comedy Bad Words, the directorial debut of actor Jason Bateman (Arrested Development, Horrible Bosses). Of the film, Jones writes, “[I]t’s not much to look at, but at least [Bateman] has the nerve to push the insolence, profanity, and brutal insult humor to its absolute limits.” I haven’t seen the film, but such an evaluation seems fitting of not only Bad Words but most films directed by actors, which tend to focus on dialogue and performance more than visual and formal design....

BRIAN JACKSON/SUN-TIMES MEDIA Will the mayor (pictured here with Alderman Robert Maldonado) bow to the will of the people and order the Board of Education to reverse itself? If Chicago truly were a democracy, the members of the Board of Education would admit they had royally messed up and would reconvert Ames from a marine academy back to a regular neighborhood school. Here’s the deal . . . I’m not sure exactly why Maldonado hankered so passionately for a marine school....

The upstate New York band Woods has been a model of consistency in recent years, balancing relatively ragtag jamminess (often spiked with some Krautrock flavor) and hooky, strummy pop songs, all of them delivered with an appealing casualness. On its new album, With Love and With Light (Woodist), the group has excised much of its shambling excess, putting full faith in the endearing melodies delivered by singer Jeremy Earl in his gentle falsetto....

Bangers Versus Fuckers Before he was fronting Thee Oh Sees, John Dwyer was creating high-strung, noisy garage racket in the Coachwhips, a stripped-down trio who originally called it a day in 2005. With Thee Oh Sees on hiatus, Dwyer had some free time during this year’s South by Southwest fest in Austin, so why not get the old band back together? Coachwhips played more shows than I could count at SXSW, and in my short time there last week I was lucky enough to catch them play on a floor, surrounded by rabid fans, late on Friday night....