For a while last winter, Jayna Zweiman was the most famous artist in America, although almost no one could identify her by name. But everyone saw her work. It appeared in newspapers and magazines and all across the Internet. It was duplicated hundreds of thousands of times and displayed en masse at the various Women’s Marches around the world. Immediately Gass decided that “Welcome Blanket” was something she wanted to work on....

I’m sure I’m not alone when I say that my favorite recording by trumpeter Art Farmer was his stunning 1964 album To Sweden With Love (Atlantic), a lyrical quartet session inspired by a tour his group took through the country mentioned in the album’s title. I’ve read differing accounts about where the concept came from—either a producer suggested it, or Farmer himself conceived the notion of playing Swedish folk songs in a jazz mode, after hearing some local players do just that while he was touring there—but in the end it hardly matters....

Solo Sam started his rap career while playing NCAA Division 1 football for Valparaiso University, and the arts have long been in his DNA. His father, Ghanaian painter Samuel Akainyah, moved to Chicago in 1975 to attend the School of the Art Institute, and Sam has followed in his footsteps to become a multidisciplinary artist. He’s a glassblower by trade who specializes in cold working, a technique that involves shaping glass after it’s cooled; I’ve yet to see his glasswork, but if it’s anything like his music, it must be top-of-the-line....

It sounds like the stuff of night terrors, and based on Austrian-born, Paris-based artist-choreographer Gisèle Vienne’s other haunting pieces, it very well could be: nine ventriloquists and their dummies gather to chat in a performance inspired by the real-life Vent Haven Museum in Kentucky, host to an annual convention and a graveyard for retired dolls. With the help of Germany’s Puppentheater Halle and regular collaborator Dennis Cooper, known for his “transgressive” literature, Vienne promises to explore the layers and subtleties of voices and identities, embodied and otherwise....

Three men—an ex-con, a disgraced cop, and the kid—hole up in a crummy motel room on the eve of a bank robbery. Each of them is desperate. Each is armed. Only one of them knows the other two, and he doesn’t know enough. Sounds like a classic setup, right? Playwright Cody Lucas clearly thinks so: he has the would-be bandidos in his Tres Bandidos spend quite a bit of time discussing the great movie westerns, from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to Unforgiven, with the winking implication that this situation echoes and plays on them....

Mike Sula Ramp peta with ramp pesto A few years back friend of the Food Chain Jim Samata was strolling through his western-suburban neighborhood when he caught a powerful whiff of raw onion in the air. He followed his nose to a vacant lot where a mansion had recently been demolished. There, above a shaded gully, some workers were trimming trees and creating the olfactory disturbance when the limbs crashed into the understory....

Arlen Parsa, a local documentary maker and Columbia College graduate, never realized there was another artist in his family until his maternal grandmother died in 2013 and his mother, inspired to research the family’s history, learned that her grandfather, Eustasio Rosales, had been a composer of some renown. “She did a random Google search and discovered that his music is actually on the Internet,” Parsa explains. “This song of his had survived a hundred years and is still apparently being performed in South America....

Despite what the Frenchy name suggests, Bastille (or BΔSTILLE if you’re willing to go along with their preferred styling) are an alt-rock band from London. According to Wikipedia the group started out as the solo project of front man Dan Smith, and from my limited exposure to them the whole endeavor has the typical singer-songwriter-with-a-band kind of feel. Nearly a year ago they released a single called “Pompeii.” It was a full-blown smash in the UK, but in the States it’s had more of a slow buildup....

Chicago underground hip-hop hero Mike “Mic One” Malinowski died this weekend at age 40. Malinowski cut his teeth with the Noise Pollution crew in the 90s; he dropped his first solo album, Who’s the Illest?, in 1998, around when he met longtime collaborator Chad Sorenson, aka DJ Risky Bizness. “Mike was a performance artist,” Sorenson says. “Our goal was to make these rock-star-style shows, but with hip-hop.” Malinowski drew on a love for rock he’d inherited from his family—at one Metro gig, part of the Molemen’s Chicago Rocks series, Malinowski and his band closed by inserting a cover of A Tribe Called Quest’s “Bonita Applebum” into Radiohead’s “Creep” (and then Malinowski smashed his guitar)....

After the bows and applause on the night I attended this two-actor rendition of J.M. Barrie’s classic story, a little girl in the audience wailed to her mother, “I don’t want to leave!” It’s a completely understandable reaction to this enchanting 90-minute one-act from the troupe Bros do Prose, directed by Christian Libonati and starring Breon Arzell and Ella Raymont. While Arzell and Raymont primarily portray Peter Pan and Wendy, they also play a multitude of characters using accents, body language, props, and, most notably, infinite energy....

This is not Hum. The PRFBBQ, a huge underground music festival that was born years ago on the Electrical Audio message board, takes over the Lincoln Square pizzeria Borelli’s this weekend, with over 40 bands playing inside, underneath, and on top of the restaurant. Most of the festival caters to the noisy punk that EA message boarders tend to make (Fake Limbs play on Fri 6/20 and Nonagon headline on Sun 6/22), but the highlight of the festival is on the night of Sat 6/21, when some excellent bands—ear-shattering locals Pinebender and Peoria space-rockers Hum, to name a couple—go all Let It Be and take to the roof of the building to play their sets....

One afternoon a little more than 50 years ago, the photographer Michael Cooper wandered into the bar at the Chateau Marmont in LA and happened to run into a friend, the writer Terry Southern. Southern had time for just one drink, and then he had to get to the airport. He had an assignment from Esquire to cover the National Democratic Convention in Chicago. Jean Genet and William S. Burroughs were covering it too—their editor, Harold Hayes, had a feeling that the event might be better understood by absurdists rather than political hacks—and they’d planned to meet up with Allen Ginsberg....

In the month since Paramount Pictures released Noah, countless newspapers and websites have published essays explaining (and often debating) its fidelity to traditional Jewish texts. It’s common knowledge now that Darren Aronofsky and Ari Handel based their screenplay not only on the story of Noah and the Flood as it appears in the Torah, but on the many tales and scholarly interpretations it has inspired throughout Jewish history (they also consulted with rabbis and scholars from multiple Judaic denominations)....

Back in the late 60s, after she flunked out of Ohio State because she decided she’d rather drink beer and raise hell than study, Helaine Garren returned to Chicago in shame and moved back in with her parents, who wanted her to marry a nice Jewish boy. Instead, she got a job in the finance office at Northwestern’s downtown campus and spent her lunch hours shooting pool on the table in the office basement with her friend Bonnie....

Algonquin Books Last night I finished reading A Life in Men, a new novel by a Chicago writer named Gina Frangello. I felt compelled to read the whole thing, but I’m not sure how much I actually enjoyed it. Frangello builds suspense by playing with time and withholding information about past events that affect how characters behave in the present. Instead, this is how I read it: as soon as I learned that something bad happened in Greece and got bored reading about Mary’s adventures in London bonding with an (unconvincingly written) American heroin addict, I skipped ahead and read all the Greek chapters first, and then went back and read the others....

There’s a glorious passage in Night Moves, the latest book by music editor and critic (and onetime Reader contributor) Jessica Hopper, during which she recounts a 2004 bike ride down Damen Avenue. As she travels along, she rattles off a stream-of-consciousness list of the Chicago landmarks she passes along the way (“Pilsen’s strip malls,” “Little Italy’s ass end,” “the Drag City office”). Your interest in the texture of Chicago has always shown through in your writing, but what made this retrospective important for you to publish now?...

I haven’t heard the first two albums by Jess Williamson, but she cut her third effort, Cosmic Wink (Mexican Summer), after moving from her native Austin, Texas, to Los Angeles in 2016, and the first half of the album title is an apt descriptor for what’s inside. Her moody love songs stretch simple guitar parts toward the horizon, while her rudimentary, fragile vocals channel some unseen energy; she chants her lyrics with an mystical expansiveness....

When Queequeg, the tattooed cannibal harpoonist in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, comes down with a fever, he asks the Pequod‘s carpenter to build him a floating coffin. But once the illness passes and he regains his strength, the crew repurposes the carpenter’s handiwork as a life buoy, which after the wreck of the ship saves the novel’s narrator, Ishmael. In 2016, when percussionist Michael Zerang performed in Blair Thomas’s staging of Moby-Dick (a story the puppeteer had been staging and restaging since 1990), one of his duties was to crank out musical drones on a prop called Queequeg’s Coffin....

It was coming up on 15 minutes past the scheduled 8:30 start time for Ms. Lauryn Hill’s headlining Pitchfork set when her DJ started playing Nas’s “If I Ruled the World,” which features Hill’s classic rendition of Kurtis Blow’s hook from the original—her cooing vocals over the itchy percussion of the song’s intro were met with thunderous anticipatory applause. But in moments it became disappointingly clear that this was not, in fact, the song that was going to introduce Ms....

After moving to Chicago from Nigeria in 2014 to pursue a master’s in marketing from Roosevelt University, Efe Iyare recalls the culture shock he had. “I realized that there was a huge bias about me being African and what that represented,” he says.”People had no idea, just based off what they have seen in the media, where I came from or my culture.” The experience left him feeling inspired. “I felt obligated to represent [Africa] in my own way....