Laurie Anderson’s Heart of a Dog is not just a movie but a guided meditation, drawing viewers into a state of peaceful contemplation from which they can consider such subjects as death, loss, and unconditional love. Over soothing music (which she composed herself), Anderson addresses these topics in tranquil, informal voice-over narration, as though engaging one in conversation. The film moves gracefully between the profound and the mundane, as Anderson digresses from her core concerns to consider such things as street life in her native Manhattan and the behavior of her dearly departed dog, Lolabelle....

Alias Grace Margaret Atwood’s unimaginative, heavy-handed 1996 novel, which uses the lurid 1843 murder conviction of 16-year-old domestic servant Grace Marks to draw easy antipatriarchal moral lessons, gets an unimaginative, heavy-handed stage adaptation from playwright Jennifer Blackmer. But against tall odds director Karen Kessler and her stalwart cast imbue the staid, schematic proceedings with vibrant life in this Rivendell world premiere. Each actor in the story’s central triangle—Ashley Neal as the convicted murderer, Jane Baxter Miller as her none-too-enlightened jailer, Steve Haggard as the none-too-enlightened doctor tending to both women’s contradictory needs—brings an eye for nuanced detail (Miller’s inscrutable smile is impossibly layered), turning near stock characters into compelling conundrums....

John Locher, AP Photos Lookin’ good If there’s a rift between Derrick Rose and the Chicago Bulls the Bulls won’t wind up on the right side of it, so it’s smart that they aren’t trying to. Rose apparently refused to pimp for the Bulls in order to lure a selfish, defense-deficient so-called superstar he didn’t want to play with—Carmelo Anthony—and good for him. This is the most shining hour for Rose’s character since the last algebra quiz he took for himself back at Simeon....

Will Braden knows how to say “cat,” “funny cat,” “cat fall,” and “cat fail” in more than 20 different languages. It’s a skill he acquired while plumbing the depths of YouTube to create reels for CatVideoFest, a touring event to celebrate cat videos and raise money for local animal shelters. The family-friendly festival, currently in the middle of a 14-city tour, comes to the Music Box Theatre this Sunday, September 9, for two screenings....

As rock ‘n’ roll has become increasingly irrelevant to the modern pop music conversation, its most faithful fans, those who still believe it’s infused with the same revolutionary transformative energy it had at its birth, have started to fall into one of three categories: snobs who would have spent the 60s listening to jazz and complaining about how vapid the music on the radio was, those who grew up on rock and aren’t about to ditch it for rap or dance music, and the very young....

Sean Coon/Wikimedia Commons Fripp in 2007 Robert Fripp is my favorite rock guitarist. Classically trained from a young age, Fripp’s “crosspicking” technique, classical and avant-garde leanings, and range of approaches to his instrument make him stand out even among rock-guitar greats. Whether playing fractured and chunky riffs with King Crimson, bafflingly fast solos as a session musician, or texturally rich loops in his collaborations with Brian Eno, Fripp’s guitar work always bears his unmistakable signature....

Imagine Ridley Scott’s predicament when, two months before the release of his sci-fi adventure The Martian, NASA informed him on the down-low that it had discovered water on Mars. In The Martian, Matt Damon plays a U.S. astronaut mistakenly left behind on the red planet; forced to improvise, he manufactures his own water by burning the rocket fuel hydrazine to release hydrogen, which then combines with the oxygen in his little laboratory to create condensation....

Peter Boyle and Peter Falk in The Brink’s Job Sorcerer, currently touring the United States in a new digital restoration, is undoubtedly one of the year’s great rediscoveries, yet the reevaluation of William Friedkin’s filmography is far from complete. Rampage (1987/1992), for instance, remains an obscure item to all but Friedkin completists and serial killer buffs, though it offers more food for thought than most serial killer films. And then there’s The Brink’s Job (1978), Friedkin’s first film after Sorcerer and one of the only comedies he directed post-French Connection....

Outdoor music festivals tend to wear out their own fans. There’s only so much hot sun, crowd congestion, and spider-infested porta-potties you can take before you ask yourself, “What the hell am I doing here?” If a fest runs three days, as Riot Fest has for several years now, by the third nearly everyone will have reached that point. Even the teenagers will be dragging. But there were plenty of reasons to trek to Douglas Park for the last day of Riot Fest 2018....

I love food. I’m just not in love with it. I understand the ideology of local sourcing, the ethics of organics, the romance of global influences, the beauty of a good gut, the sacrament of artful presentation. But none of that fascinates me the way the chocolate fudge layer cake at the Cheesecake Factory does. I can’t bring myself to approach eating with the learned earnestness of the true believer....

Cascading down from the leftmost wall of the exhibition space at the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, Diana Gabriel’s large installation Interlace (2015) layers hundreds of feet of yarn to create a 3-D drawing that hangs in midair. The multicolored piece forms a tunnel that allows visitors to walk through its center and observe the exhibition through the lens of the pink, purple, and yellow work. “I wanted the artworks to take advantage of the physical space,” said Robin Dluzen, curator of “Skimption,” a new showcase for emerging local artists at UIMA....

Saint Laurence Catholic Church, which began its life at 71st and Dorchester as a monument to God, is ending it as a monument to white flight. Built in 1911 for the Irish of the Greater Grand Crossing neighborhood, the church began to empty out in the 1950s, and was finally deconsecrated in 2002; the mostly Protestant blacks who had moved into the neighborhood couldn’t provide the members or the money to keep it open....

Throughout its thirty-five years as a band, Eleventh Dream Day has regularly sprinkled its incendiary sets with carefully chosen covers of obscure and well-known rock songs. Since I started listening to them, I’ve accumulated many vivid memories, such as hearing them trace the seething rise and fall of the Dream Syndicate’s “Halloween,” embrace the idiotic hokum of Bachman Turner Overdrive’s “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet” (with singer Rick Rizzo masterfully replicating the song’s trademark stuttering chorus), and ripping like a buzzsaw through the Urinals’ punk masterpiece “I’m a Bug....

On its surface Whitney: Can I Be Me, which screens this weekend at the Siskel Center as part of the Black Harvest Film Festival, is a documentary about pop star Whitney Houston, the phenomenally talented singer whose career was cut short at age 48 when, under the influence of a variety of drugs, she accidentally drowned in a bathtub at the Beverly Hilton Hotel on February 11, 2012. But for its first hour Whitney employs Houston’s life story as the basis of a fascinating and complex examination of identity....

I was introduced to postindustrial, antidisco band Factory Floor by Reader music editor Philip Montoro—meaning he assigned me to write about them for the upcoming Pitchfork Music Festival, and I had no choice but to oblige. And I thank him for it. The London trio’s self-titled debut that dropped late last year is a sinister dance party of bare-bones beats—created by live and computer drumming—and warped, lifeless vocals. The backbone of today’s 12 O’Clock Track, “Two Different Ways,” is a herky-jerky, scratchy rhythm that’s reminiscent of something you might hear at a strobe-filled rave that takes place well beneath the earth’s surface....

courtesy Illinois Holocaust Museum Ruth Gruber in Alaska, looking more fabulous in the freezing cold than you could ever dream. Ruth Gruber, the 102-year-old photographer whose work goes on display this Sunday at the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center, has had an amazing life. Some of it has been described in a preview of the exhibit, called “Ruth Gruber: Photojournalist”: her travels in the Soviet arctic and through the Alaskan frontier; her stewardship of 1,000 Jewish refugees who traveled from Italy to upstate New York in 1944 aboard the ship Henry Gibbins; her photographs showing the deplorable conditions aboard another ship of refugees, the Exodus, which had been denied entry into Palestine by the British and was eventually sent back to Germany....

I first heard today’s 12 O’Clock Track four or five years ago at the Hideout, when bassist Joshua Abrams was spinning records between sets during one of the club’s old weekly jazz nights. It riveted me immediately thanks to the funky, propulsive drumming of James Black, one of many great timekeepers from New Orleans, and within a few bars I was totally sold. I learned that the song, “I’ve Got What You Need,” appeared on Psychedelphia (Funky Delicacies), a compilation of tracks by singer Mary Jane Hooper, and I quickly tracked it down—but I’m slightly embarrassed to admit that I didn’t listen to the album again till this past weekend....

Quasi at the Quackadero It seems to be experimental-animation month in Chicago. Two weeks ago the local outfit BAWSY Animation presented the first Scored Silent Film Festival, which featured new animated shorts with live musical accompaniment. This week Chicago Filmmakers will present a program of independent animated works from the 1970s and ’80s, all of them on 16-millimeter. “These films were all painstakingly created over the course of years,” notes the Filmmakers website, “all before computers were involved with the art form....

Q: Is it even possible for a couple that stopped having sex to start back up again? My girlfriend and I (we’re both women) have been together for four years, and we haven’t had sex for two. I thought the sex was good before it stopped, but apparently she was going through the motions. She’s a sex worker, and it took her a while to figure out she was not being present, and she wanted to stop having sex with me until she could figure out how to change that....

Gossip Wolf loves blistering, ugly powerviolence as much as the next apex predator—but we’d have to give new local shit squad Georgia O’Queef props for their name even if they sounded like Wilco. After a spin or two through their Bandcamp page, though, it seems safe to say they traffic exclusively in Cookie Monster growls, death harpy screams, and Daytona 500 tempos. On Tue 7/15, Georgia O’Queef self-release a seven-song demo tape and headline the Burlington with Lil Tits, Gas Mask Horse, and others....