The possession of something extraordinary isn’t always such a wonderful thing. Look, the mural seemed to say to passersby, here is something so urgent, it has spilled out from the constraints of proper stained glass windows to cover every inch of this facade. The Northside Stranger’s Home building was an Episcopal church when it was built in 1901. Catholics took it over in 1927, when the neighborhood was largely Italian, renaming it San Marcello....

AhabThe Boats of the Glen Carrig (Napalm) Depression Cherry by Beach House Golden PelicansOldest Ride, Longest Line (Total Punk) Los Angeles noise-rock group Health haven’t released a proper full-length in six years, at least if you don’t count their 2010 disco edits of their sophomore album (2009’s Get Color) or their 2012 soundtrack to the video game Max Payne 3 (which some of their fans don’t even know they’ve done). But no matter how many years you figure Health have been dormant, the new Death Magic is a tremendous return, an evolution toward accessible pop that keeps their ear-­shattering violence intact....

By chance, Governor Bruce Rauner unveiled his hokey duct-tape commercials around the same time students and faculty from Northeastern Illinois University took to the streets to protest cuts that threaten to put their school out of existence. After the commercials aired, Rauner insisted they weren’t campaign spots. “Really, we’re just trying to communicate with the people of Illinois,” he told reporters last week while making a visit to Decatur, which he insisted wasn’t a campaign appearance....

Even back in the late 80s, Jack Riley knew his job was about more than just drug busts. But he also found that a good bust was a thing to relish. In 1987 Chicago, like other American cities, was awash in cocaine from Central and South America, and sales of it had moved into the open. Residents of the west-side Austin neighborhood were complaining to the police that dealers had set up shop in and around the Washington Pines, a seven-story apartment hotel where men were seen hanging out in the lobby all day and night....

The allhallows ghouls have given us the greatest gift of all this year: Halloween on a Saturday. That means more celebrations than ever—and less of a chance that you’ll accidentally show up to work in full skeleton face. But with so many more options, how can you possibly choose the perfect haunt for the weekend? Boneshaker Redmoon’s annual bash includes everything a real party needs: bumper cars, arcade games, cocktails, a temporary tattoo parlor, and aerial artists....

Should the New York Times have published an anonymous op-ed by a “senior” administration official that was sure to send the president on a rampage? Was the author gutless not to sign it? Margaret Sullivan, media columnist for the Washington Post (she’d earlier held a similar position at the Times), has weighed in, saying “yes” to the first question and “possibly” to the second. But Sullivan was witty enough to look past these two obvious debate points into what she called a “quagmire of weirdness: fraught with issues of journalistic ethics and possibly even legal concerns....

At 8 PM on Friday, August 25, the Goose Island design studio Lost Arts will host a new screening project called Destroy Your Art, in which five local filmmakers will present new short films, then destroy the hard drives on which they were recorded immediately after screening them. Organized by the husband-and-wife team of local filmmaker Jack Newell and entrepreneur Rebecca Fons, Destroy Your Art represents a rebuke to the individualized nature through which people regard films today....

Unassuming Chicago musical wunderkind Seth Engel has his hand in too many musical projects to print in a short concert preview; even listed on his website, the titles of albums he’s produced, engineered, or played on take up a great deal of real estate­. Suffice to say, if you’ve spent any time at this year at Subterranean (where he and his bands are frequent performers), a punk house show, or Pitchfork Music Festival, you’ve probably seen Engel bringing some unfathomably complicated music to life....

Alex Wroblewski courtesy Chicago Sun-Times Common at Aahh! Fest During Common’s headlining performance at yesterday’s Aahh! Fest the Chicago hip-hop icon called the daylong bash “a breath of fresh air.” Yes, the rapper’s biased—he helped organize the affair, and the phrase “by Common” appeared on festival banners—but he had a point. After three months jammed with multiday events featuring more acts than one person could reasonably expect to see Aahh!...

Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. Hey, did you read: That Lollapalooza will be four days long next year? —Leor Galil Richard A. Posner and Eric J. Segall on “Justice Scalia’s Majoritarian Theocracy?” —John Dunlevy About the origins of falafel? —Aimee Levitt Malcolm Gladwell on why each school shooter is more “normal” than the one before him? —Tony Adler About snugglers for hire? —Leor Galil That a day after denouncing the “misguided” calls for a federal probe of the Chicago Police Department, Mayor Emanuel said this morning he welcomes such an investigation?...

This month marks the 50th anniversary of two seminal pieces of Chicago art. Broadcaster Studs Terkel made a tape of reactions from the bewildered crowd that day, and another legendary Chicagoan, Illinois’s newly appointed poet laureate, Gwendolyn Brooks, was also there, reading the poem she’d been tasked with writing for the occasion. She’d seen only a small scale model of the sculpture before that moment, but she’d found it inscrutable, its ambiguity uncomfortable and cold....

The Comedy Exposition of 2014 started with a single tweet. “It’s not so much about filling the void of JFL,” says Hasz, a coproducer of the weekly stand-up show Parlour Car at Bar Deville. “Almost every city with a good scene has a fun, comedian-run festival. And aside from a couple small festivals like SnubFest and the Women’s Funny Festival, Chicago doesn’t really have one.” Hasz and her crew initially planned for the Comedy Exposition to have 40 slots—20 locals and 20 out-of-towners—but they ended up accepting nearly 60 comics....

With Slow Stretch, the new gallery installation from curatorial collective Third Object, interdisciplinary artists Sarah Belknap, Joseph Belknap, and Eileen Rae Walsh dissolve the boundaries that typically circumscribe artists in collaboration. The show, open through April 3 at Mana Contemporary Chicago, is a mess of visual conversation, and although there’s never any question as to which artist produced each work, the idea of “work” as a discrete visual unit is called into question by the three artists and Third Object’s curators....

Cellist Tristan Honsinger fled his native America in 1969 to avoid the draft, settling in Montreal, where he discovered improvised music and changed his musical life. Starting in 1974 he lived in Europe, bouncing around between Paris, Florence, and Amsterdam, where he built his reputation as an indefatigably curious player who worked with a who’s who of heavies including guitarist Derek Bailey, pianist Cecil Taylor, and saxophonist Evan Parker. Over the last couple of decades his best-known work has occurred within the ICP Orchestra, where his ferociously textured bowed improvisations and love of slapstick and European cabaret music have proved simpatico with the absurdist tendencies and surprise-laden MO of founders Misha Mengelberg and Han Bennink....

Q: I’m a 59-year-old man in good health. For basically my whole adult life, I’ve had this problem during intercourse with a woman of (1) being very quick to come and (2) having a too intense “cringey” sensation when I come. This has led to often going soft at the prospect of intercourse. This too intense feeling makes me stop moving when I come, which is not satisfying at all. It doesn’t happen with hand jobs or oral sex—they feel fine and good....

When Eliza Ramirez’s eighth-grade students at Emiliano Zapata Academy in Little Village learned that they’d be spending the fall and winter corresponding with a class of tenth graders at Amundsen High School in Ravenswood and that the letters would be collected into a book published by 826CHI, a nonprofit writing center, they were skeptical. What was the point of writing letters, they wondered, in this marvelous age of text messages and Snapchat?...

It’s about damn time Julie Klausner got her own show. Since 2011, the writer, comedian, and cocreator/costar of the new Hulu sitcom Difficult People has—among other things—hosted the very funny podcast How Was Your Week, an interview show that always begins with a meandering account of what Klausner read, watched, or thought about that week, from beagles to Andrew McCarthy to the virtues of pasta topped with cottage cheese. She doesn’t necessarily attempt to relate to an audience’s shared experience of the world—she just invites the audience to listen as she shares hers....

Maureen Muldoon is a captivating storyteller. From the opening moments of her one-woman show, the inaugural production in Madison Street Theatre’s Power of One solo series, she captures our attention and keeps it with an hour’s worth of rambling autobiographical musings, mixed in with bits of song and some performance poetry. Muldoon, a contemporary suburban mom, broods on how to respond to her daughter’s announcement, via a sign on the bedroom door, that she identifies as pansexual and transgender and prefers the pronouns “he,” “him,” and “his....

Aaron Dexter Automatic Recordings sampler If you end up hanging out at the Milwaukee Avenue Arts Festival’s north stage Sunday afternoon chances are you’ll see a burly man passing out copies of a red cassette housed in a black-and-white paper sleeve—it’s the sampler for a new local label called Automatic Recordings. Label founder Aaron Dexter, the talent buyer at the Owl, will be the guy giving away the tapes. Dexter’s plan for Automatic Recordings is to release music by local rock acts that regularly play in DIY spaces in Logan Square, Humboldt Park, and Pilsen....

Improvisation has become the sriracha of performing arts. People are always finding new places to put it, from moviemaking to corporate-team building. I suppose most of those uses make sense. When you come down to it, improv is just a technique for getting folks to connect to one another as constructively as possible. What process couldn’t use a little of that? But I never understood why anybody would want to build a contest around it....