HarperCollins A misleadingly cheerful cover for a very grim book The one great thing about the sort of bone-crushing cold we had earlier this week is that it gives you serious bragging rights. People in New York are complaining that it’s a piddling three degrees? Pffffft. We had 15 below! Now that it’s gotten up to freezing, doesn’t it make you feel like a better, stronger person to be able to say that you lived in a city where it got to be 15 below and you went outside (even if it was only for a minute to toss boiling water or learn how it feels when your nose hairs freeze, it still counts) and lived to tell about it?...

On the forthcoming The Crossing (due September 14 on Yep Roc), veteran Austin rocker Alejandro Escovedo refracts his life as a second-generation Mexican-American in a concept album about two immigrants from Mexico and Italy who meet while working in a Texas restaurant, focusing on the shared and disparate personal experiences that brought them to the same spot. Album single “Sonica USA” steps away from that narrative, instead reflecting on the sense of power Escovdeo felt in the 70s watching Mexican-American punk band the Zeros (which was cofounded and fronted by his brother, Javier), and the pride he takes now in offering his immigrant peers a model of what it can look like to follow your own path....

With 14 books, a handful of plays, and even a comic strip on the beings and doings of the magical land of Oz, you would think L. Frank Baum, its self-styled Royal Historian, had adequately expounded upon the adventures of the quirky folk of a more colorful universe. However, our hunger for a more fabulous reality being insatiable, many others have taken up the task since Baum’s death 99 years ago, producing dozens more books, and, of course, Wicked and The Wiz....

For me, the highlights of the recent budget hearings—including the raucous one at the South Shore Cultural Center—were watching Mayor Rahm and his aides struggle to blame Mayor Daley for everything that’s wrong without mentioning his name. There’s Mayor Emanuel, who broke into Chicago politics as a Daley fund-raiser back in the 80s. Also on the South Shore stage was Avis LaVelle, the hearing’s moderator. No budget hearing is complete without one or two speakers bashing the parking meter deal....

Katie Graves The Nexus Project: Benjamin Holliday Wardell and Michel Rodriguez Cintra Male duo the Nexus Project is back with their first collaboration since an inaugural program last November. Staged in the gallery at the Chicago Artists Coalition as part of the “Moving Canvas” series, Michel Rodriguez Cintra and Benjamin Holliday Wardell’s new dance takes its cue from the playful group exhibit that surrounds them, but where “Quasi-Choreography” features visual art transformed by the intervention of other artists, the Nexus Project draws on the audience....

The craft beer boom of the past several years has gifted Chicago with much more than some really fine suds. A dizzying number of new breweries have become the creative homes of brewers who’re taking a kind of auteurist approach to making inspired, sometimes unconventional beers using recipes that seem limited only by their creators’ imaginations. Nearly two dozen of those breweries in and around the city offer regular tours, giving the public the chance to drink in the distinctive culture around each brewery—and an excuse to drink lots of freshly made beer....

The power of Joshua Abrams’s Natural Information Society is in large measure derived from a singular sense of purpose: to lock in on a single chord and with subtle, kaleidoscopic modality cast a spell at the nexus of a hypnotic groove. That intent is carried forth on the Chicago band’s fourth and best album, Simultonality (Eremite), but this time they’ve pulled back from a general focus on North and East African traditional music to further refine their attack with generous dollops of Krautrock and classical minimalism....

Austin’s A Giant Dog are the type of band that shouldn’t stand out as much as they do. The five-piece, whose lineup at one point featured Texas garage-rock wunderkind Orville Neeley (OBN IIIs, Bad Sports, etc) on drums, play straightforward, no-frills, punky rock ’n’ roll. Nothing fancy, nothing special, they hammer through tracks with rock-solid confidence that rivals the garage-rock greats. “Photograph,” the first single from next month’s Toy (Merge), hints at what could just be their best record yet....

Aimee Levitt Oh, life! Oh, coffee! I am a firm believer in the magical restorative powers of coffee. I am not quite right until I have my morning cup, preferably made from recently roasted beans, brewed in a French press, and consumed at my kitchen table, but even the preground, slightly burned stuff at the office will do. Without it, my mind is blurry. I feel headachy. It’s quite possible that this has nothing to do with coffee itself but the fact that I am hopelessly addicted....

I thought Pete Shelley was going to die the night Buzzcocks played the Double Door in May 2010. The temperature hadn’t dropped much from its afternoon high of 90 degrees, and the club felt like a steam bath. Shelley’s hair had thinned and he’d put on a ton of weight since I’d last seen the British punk legends seven years earlier. He seemed to be suffering badly under the lights, and as he sweated through the band’s early punk-pop classics—”I Don’t Mind,” “Love You More,” “Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve)”—I wondered how many times he’d sung them since they first hit stores in 1978, and where his mind went while his body was tearing through them at breakneck speed....

Outsider R&B vet T. Valentine is no stranger to the Reader. He appeared in The Secret History of Chicago Music back in 2012, a dozen years after Norton released a compilation of his scattered, decades-long recordings, Hello Lucille … Are You A Lesbian? The title of the Norton album shares its name with Valentine’s 1985 seven-inch, a bizarre novelty record that made it into the rotation at Northwestern University’s student station, WNUR, and garnered a cult status as the years marched on....

Josephine Baker had the sweetest ride in Paris. The six subjects of Judith Mackrell’s new group biography, Flappers, were notorious celebrities in the 1920s, though mostly forgotten today, which is as good a reason as any to pick up the book and start reading. In her introduction, Mackrell attempts to state her case that all six were emblematic of the 1920s, in eternal competition with the 60s to be the Decade That Changed Everything....

Reginald Vanderbilt, the early-20th-century millionaire often credited with inventing the Stinger, described it as “a short drink with a long reach, a subtle blending of ardent nectars, a boon to friendship, a dispeller of care.” (At least that’s what a syndicated 1923 newspaper article reported, though in his updated edition of Imbibe, David Wondrich describes the article as “gossipy.”) It’s a difficult promise for any cocktail to live up to, and I doubt that most people these days would consider creme de menthe, one of the cocktail’s two ingredients, to be an “ardent nectar....

Queen of Earth is a psychological horror film about a woman on the edge of madness and the “frenemy” ready to push her over it. Neither character is all that likable, yet each inspires a good deal of fascination. Writer-director Alex Ross Perry (The Color Wheel, Listen Up Philip) conjures such a strong atmosphere around his characters—and Elisabeth Moss and Katherine Waterston are so powerful in the leads—that one gets sucked into their emotional conflict....

Chicago rappers G Herbo and Lil Bibby have collaborated for as long as local rap fans have been sifting through the dregs of the Internet looking for their material, for as long as Drake has been using their names as chess pieces to further his own credibility, and for as long as it’s taken the first wave of drill think pieces to evaporate (and with it the ability to grasp the idea that drill is more than a vehicle for samples of gunshots)....

Maybe the collaboration between minimalist composer Arnold Dreyblatt and trio Megafaun on 2013’s Appalachian Excitation (Northern Spy) seemed odd at first: the former came up in the fertile underground experimental NYC scene of the 1970s, while the latter keep to the hills of Durham, North Carolina, propagating an off-kilter brand of psych-touched folk. But Dreyblatt, who’s been based in Berlin since the 80s, is both an innovative and an adaptable avant-garde composer, unreluctant to build rhythms upon which to elaborate....

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Decameron One reason I found this spring’s Pier Paolo Pasolini retrospective so valuable was that it marked the first time I considered Pasolini’s cinematic output as a continuous narrative. The Italian poet-novelist-public intellectual-director was one of the great political artists in film history—not only because of the content of his individual films, but because he recognized how his films functioned societally. Some of Pasolini’s films stand in response to contemporary cultural trends (Love Meetings, Porcile), some challenge long-standing prejudices in Italian society (Mamma Roma, Teorema), and other films, made in response to the public reception of his work, functioned as autocritiques....

Like a lot of folks at the Pitchfork Music Festival, Gossip Wolf checked out bands, made new friends, chilled with old friends (and fake friends!), and kept an eye out for famous faces around Union Park. On Friday the Haim sisters grooved to Iceage alongside the Blue Stage, and on Saturday actress Marina Squerciati—aka the plucky Officer Burgess on NBC’s Chicago P.D.—made the scene with a group of pals. This wolf almost tripped over Nick Viall from ABC’s The Bachelorette, a show no self-­respecting canid would watch (or at least admit to watching)....

The Salem witch trials will fascinate Americans for as long as those events roil our own capacity for lunacy. In a recent Bleader post, the Reader‘s Aimee Levitt discusses the Salem trials with Stacy Schiff, author of the new book The Witches: Salem, 1692, and she tells us that Schiff believes “the legacy of Salem . . . has echoed throughout American history.” I wrote a lot of columns back in the early 90s about parents who came to believe their children had fallen into the clutches of satanists....

Joan of Arc founder and vocalist Tim Kinsella and electronic musician Jenny Polus—also known as Jenny Pulse, and previously as Spa Moans—both finished their own album-release and touring cycles a few weeks ago. But instead of relaxing over the holiday season, they’re firing up a brand-new duo project called Good Fuck that combines postindustrial club beats and oddball lyrics—their sound has Gossip Wolf imagining Chris & Cosey hosting a karaoke party in the back of a totally depressing grocery store....