Joe Marinaro Kuma’s Corner, winner and still champion The Best of Chicago readers’ poll is great for a bunch of reasons. For starters, it provides us all with a comprehensive overview of the city’s collective unconscious. With such disparate categories as Best Filmmaker, Best Charity, and Best Dentist, the readers’ poll runs the gamut of the Chicago experience, and even if the winners tend to repeat themselves—let’s face it, we might as well permanently reserve Best Burger for Kuma’s Corner—at least we know where we stand as a city....

On Tuesday the New York trio known as Thumbscrew will release its debut album, an eponymous release for Cuneiform Records. The trio is comprised of guitarist Mary Halvorson (one of the brightest new talents in jazz), drummer Tomas Fujiwara, and bassist Michael Formanek. Halvorson and Fujiwara have worked together in many different contexts over the years, but within this group they feel like coleaders, masterfully colliding swing rhythms and melodic sophistication with carefully meted dissonance, surprise-laden structures, and potent doses of free time....

Q: My brother just broke up with his girlfriend for the second time in eight months. They had been together for two and a half years, and she became pretty discontent when she finished college and my brother entered law school because all his time and attention weren’t revolving around her. In January, she staged this bizarre, soap-opera-esque situation to make my brother jealous, and then broke up with him when he reacted predictably....

Chicago’s got plenty of great boutiques to pick up streetwear—Leaders 1354, Jugrnaut, RSVP Gallery, Saint Alfred, Fat Tiger Workshop—but the best place to get T-shirts from Lil Durk’s Only the Family collective-slash-label is at Exclusive773. OK, this south-side shop is the only place in town that sells OTF’s wares, which hints at just how deeply embedded this place is in the local hip-hop scene. RondoNumbaNine and Lupe Fiasco shot the video for Rondo’s “Life of a Savage (Remix)” at Exclusive, and plenty of local hip-hop royalty eventually sidle through the store—take a peek at its website to peep photos of looming figures Twista and King Louie posing in the shop, and, of course, the best rapper taking drill into pop (see BTK), Lil Durk....

Beyonce’s self-titled fifth album, released by surprise on December 13, turned the music biz on its head, stole a lot of the year-end critical thunder from 2013’s other big-name releases (including her husband’s), and gave an unexpected jolt to a pop-music world that generally goes into hibernation after Thanksgiving. Both a bold and deeply rewarding artistic statement and the work of one of pop’s most reliable names at what seems like the peak of her powers, it managed to sell a million copies in under a week at a time when even major releases have trouble breaking seven digits....

This October, Chicago Filmmakers—which screens independent cinema and offers filmmaking classes on the north side—will open the doors of its new location in Edgewater, a former firehouse located at 5720 N. Ridge. Erected in 1928, the two-story building features a towering facade with brown brick and terra-cotta elements laid out in a geometric design, broad windows, and a public garden on its northern side. Near the roof sits an intricately carved stone medallion, a popular feature of city buildings from the early 20th century that speaks to the pride the designers and builders took in their craftsmanship....

To call Facility Theatre’s mesmerizing staging of New York up-and-comer Jen Silverman’s demanding Phoebe in Winter an unlikely success is an understatement. First off, the playwright behind the formulaic, audience-friendly The Roommate, seen at Steppenwolf this summer, would seem a dubious candidate to create this confounding, unsettling, multivalent fable of global, familial, and psychological warfare, more European theatrical experimentalism than American regional theater fare. And second, the cripplingly underresourced Facility, holed up in an amenity-free church school basement, wouldn’t appear well positioned to tackle a script of this magnitude....

Last Friday the lower level of the Hilton Chicago was transformed into a mini Wakanda. Lollapalooza might have been happening upstairs and across the street, but Wakandacon was in full swing downstairs. A small but devoted crowd of a few hundred people came to re-create the homeland of Black Panther. Wakandacon 2018 Though there was no official permission from Marvel to reference the fictional country, it was clear that the event was intended to create someplace like Wakanda if only for three days: a thriving and successful black community without a reliance on outsiders....

Yes, that’s right, Woke is a new collaborative project featuring three of the most adventurous musicians working at the moment: fractured fusion-influenced beat maker Flying Lotus, four-handed bass player and avant-R&B singer Thundercat, and former Digable Planets member and left-field hip-hop artist Shabazz Palaces. For their first single, “The Lavishments of Light Looking,” debuted through late-night Cartoon Network programming block Adult Swim’s “Singles” series, they’ve managed to bring on none other than George Clinton as a guest star....

Ann Nessa Hal Russell Some of my greatest experiences with live music came courtesy of the eccentric multi-instrumentalist and bandleader Hal Russell, whose work with his NRG Ensemble brought gonzo wit, fierce improvisation, and boundless energy to performance after performance. During the late 80s and early 90s, the group was a fixture at the great subterranean bar Lower Links, playing madcap sets that generated laughter as much as awe. As an observer of the local free-jazz and improvised-music scene, I feel Russell’s importance to what came in his wake over the last couple of decades is undiminished....

Screening at the Wilmette Theatre and AMC River East, this eight-film series showcases recent movies from east Asia, with an emphasis on popular genres. South Korea is represented by Cold Eyes, a suspense story about a surveillance team assigned to catch a group of bank robbers; one of the country’s biggest hits of 2013, it reportedly features some fantastic chase sequences. From Hong Kong there’s Women Who Flirt, a breezy rom-com that marks a change of pace for writer-director Pang Ho-Cheung (Vulgaria), the country’s king of gross-out humor, and Lost and Love, which features superstar Andy Lau as a father in mainland China who spends 15 years searching for his abducted child (the latter film was shot by renowned cinematographer Mark Lee Ping Bing, who’s worked with Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Wong Kar-Wai)....

It’s fitting that the Democratic reversal on school funding occurred on the eve of the Mayweather-McGregor bout. For the last few years, almost every Democrat in the state—especially the ones running for governor—has called for more progressivity in school funding, generally in the form of a progressive income tax, as opposed to the current flat tax. As I write this, it’s unclear what’s in the fine print, but the tax credits would amount to about $75 million a year for the next five years, or $375 million total....

Wednesday, August 30 Jazz Institute of Chicago Jazz Club Tour 6 PM till midnight, multiple venues (Andy’s, Green Mill, Jazz Showcase, Constellation, Hungry Brain, M Lounge, Old Town School of Folk Music, Norman’s Bistro, the Quarry, Rosa’s Lounge, Reggie’s Rock Club roof deck, Red Peppers Lounge, Winter’s Jazz Club, V75, Some Like It Black), jazzinchicago.org/jazzfest/jazz-club-tour, $50 ($40 for members), 21+ Thursday, August 31 Afterfest jam sessions hosted by Ira Sullivan with Marc Berner, Stu Katz, Larry Gray, and Greg Artry 9 PM, Jazz Showcase, 806 S....

Photo Courtesy of Ken Ellis, Taken by Gavin Morrison Bowie at Neo in August 1980 with Noni Martin and Noe Boudreau As much as David Bowie exuded his own charisma, he understood how fashion could be harnessed to magnify his power and presence: an Alexander McQueen Union Jack coat, faux-punk finery dotted with cigarette burns; or a black jumpsuit by Kansai Yamamoto sporting flared legs and thick grooves, making the wearer appear like some kind of anthropomorphic vinyl record....

Superb Bay Area trumpeter Darren Johnston has been a regular visitor to Chicago for nearly a decade, and over that time he’s fortified his connection to the local improvised music scene. Last year he dropped three recordings, two of them featuring Chicagoans. On Neutral Nation (Aerophonic), saxophonist Dave Rempis sparred with him and veteran Bay Area reedist Larry Ochs of the Rova Sax Quartet, unfurling high-energy improvisation in patient, gritty arcs....

If the brass behind the Grammys really wanted their Bee Gees tribute to be an uproarious sensation rather than a limp nonstory, they should have ditched Little Big Town for Detroit DJ and producer Kelli Hand, aka K-Hand. The B side of her newest 12-inch, Project 6 EP (released on her long-running Acacia Records), kicks off with an edit of Melba Moore’s version of the Bee Gees’ “You Stepped Into My Life....

It’s lucky Wale Nubi wore the same shoe size as his older brothers because, when he was a teenager growing up in Nigeria, they would send him their cast-off designer shoes from London, kick-starting his love of fashion. He was an IT consultant for Fortune 500 companies, selling shoes from the trunk of his car as his side hustle, when the timing was finally right to open his Hyde Park store, Jojayden, in 2016....

On a visit to Chicago one summer, Ta-Nehisi Coates, riding on the Dan Ryan, saw for the first time the dilapidated, high-rise public housing projects stretching beside the expressway. The projects were a “moral disaster,” he thought, not just for the residents but also for “the metropolis of commuters who drove by, each day, and with their quiet acquiescence tolerated such a thing.” Coates clearly doesn’t mince words in his stories....

In the seven years Gossip Wolf has covered local music (that’s 63 wolf years!), it’s become clear that bands returning from hiatus often disappoint their old fans. Who hasn’t gotten a case of the reunion blues from a former fave? Luckily, local trio the Poison Arrows have bucked the curse. The band returned in 2015, and since then this wolf has seen them drop some major ordnance live. On Friday April, 28, they released their first full-length since 2010, No Known Note (via File 13, the label run by guitarist Justin Sinkovich)....

As much as I enjoyed dinner at Dolo Restaurant and Bar, the seafood-focused modern-Chinese restaurant I wrote about on Monday, I was more excited yet to learn that they were open every morning for dim sum. Dim sum is a favorite of mine not only because I love it as comfort food but because under the right conditions, it’s a great scene. I love the experience, culinary and social, of a popular dim sum place, packed to the gills with what would appear to be the entire Chinese-American community catching up on gossip, reading Chinese newspapers, and ordering food off the carts that are rolled around the room....