The skies had just opened with a thunderous burst of rain as I walked up to the Roman Susan gallery in Rogers Park. Beads of moisture had gathered on the glass pane, creating microdistortions in the gallery’s interior—which already had the appearance of a fun house. The artist Gwendolyn Zabicki had recently finished installing her disorienting solo exhibition “Windows, Doors, and Mirrors.” She’d hung five oil paintings of windows, doors, and mirrors on a reflective material that covers the entirety of the gallery’s floors and walls....

There’s something about getting seated in Siberia for no logical reason that really allows you to let down your guard. That’s what happened one evening at Remington’s, the new Michigan Avenue “American grill” from the 4 Star Restaurant Group (Dunlays, Frasca, Smoke Daddy, etc) and the Chicago homecoming of the immensely talented chef Todd Stein, who spent the last year and a half working in Atlanta. With barely a quarter of the restaurant’s 250 seats occupied, my pal and I were escorted to a booth hidden behind a private dining room, just above the stairs leading to the restrooms....

Serengeti’s “Dennehy” is a thing of wonder, not only because it’s a love letter to Chicago but also because it’s where Serengeti (born David Cohn) becomes the character Kenny Dennis, a middle-aged, mustachioed everyman who raps about playing softball with the boys, running errands on Western Avenue, and his favorite local teams—which serves as a brilliantly simple hook, “Bears, Hawks, Sox, Bulls”). “Dennehy” has achieved a rare cult crossover success—the song isn’t in constant rotation at, say, Bears games, but ask Chicago sports fans watching the game at your neighborhood bar if they’ve heard of Serengeti and chances are at least one person will respond with the “Dennehy” hook....

Corey Wilkes Block-party season is officially here as Do-Division Street Fest kicks off Friday; High on Fire, JC Brooks & the Uptown Sound, Jimmy Whispers, the O’My’s, Screaming Females, Radar Eyes, and Oozing Wound are just some of the acts playing the three-day blowout. But if you’re looking to beat the heat and still catch some live music, there are plenty of other opportunities throughout the week. “On his latest solo album, In the Hollows (Western Vinyl), Dirty Projectors bassist Nat Baldwin plants both feet in the art-pop patch, surrounding his billowy, impatient melodies with precise string arrangements that draw on the talents of violist Nadia Sirota, violinist Rob Moose, and cellist Clarice Jensen, all members of young New York chamber group yMusic,” writes Peter Margasak....

Lee Fields If you’re looking for an unorthodox way to ring in the Sabbath on Friday, I’d recommend going to Concord Music Hall to see Say Anything, who are touring in support of their new album—Hebrews. Show up early for You Blew It! and the Front Bottoms to get a fourth-wave emo fix. “Around the time the mammoth David Comes to Life came out in 2011, I heard a friend compare Fucked Up to the Gin Blossoms fronted by Jamey Jasta from Hatebreed,” writes Kevin Warwick....

Lydia Lunch Outkast will be in Chicago in a little more than a month, but if you don’t have a ticket to Lollapalooza you won’t get to see them here; however, if you’ve got a way of getting up to Milwaukee this weekend you can get tickets to see the fantastic Atlanta hip-hop duo perform at Summerfest on Sunday. If you’re not in the mood for a getaway concert there are plenty of other shows happening in town this weekend....

On Friday, the Portage Theater hosts a rap showcase organized by Lyrical Lemonade, which has come to occupy an unusual position in the local hip-hop scene since music videographer Cole Bennett founded it in 2013. Bennett, now 21, has developed Lyrical Lemonade into much more than an outlet for his video work: today it’s also a rap blog, a show promoter (LL booked Lil Uzi Vert‘s first Chicago show last year), and a clothing line....

Hip left-coast label LA Club Resource has been good to Chicago since California producer Delroy Edwards launched the label a couple years ago. Edwards is fond of Chicago’s house history and has done great work breathing new life into old local recordings. I’m particularly fond of the label’s work on Street Fighter, a long-shelved EP from house producer Steve Poindexter, which finally came out earlier this year. Next week LA Club Resource drops a four-track label compilation, and the leadoff is an excellent contribution from pioneering Chicago house producer and DJ Gene Hunt called “Ow (Drum Beat)....

Tyler Daswick: It was a day of anarchy at Lollapalooza, and the raging against the machine began with one of the earliest acts. Mick Jenkins, this year’s edition of the Shafted Rapper on Too Small a Stage, ended his energetic set with an ode to N.W.A.’s “Fuck tha Police,” and fans left ready to wreak havoc on the rest of the grounds. Cassidy Ryan: Up-and-coming Chicago rapper Mick Jenkins used water as a metaphor on his album The Water[s]....

Brian Jackson/Sun-Times Media Alderman Will Burns convinced Mayor Rahm Emanuel to back a strangely logical plan to ease overcrowding at Kenwood Academy. I used to hear west-side politicians tell stories about how the winos on skid row would take booze from precinct captains in exchange for a promise to vote the Democratic line. Then, once safely in the polling booth, they voted for whomever they wanted. In this case, I’ll admit that I actually like what the mayor’s doing....

Bill Meyer: One of Pitchfork’s pleasures comes early each day, when local up-and-comers get a crack at a big stage. Since two-thirds of the Bitchin Bajas—an instrumental trio that has drawn the right lessons in trance induction from Terry Riley, Alice Coltrane, and Cluster—perform seated before analog synthesizers, visual spectacle was not on the agenda. But they made glorious use of the Green Stage’s sound system, bathing listeners in richly layered tones and textures to transport them from a muddy field to a state of sound-induced serenity....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Tuesday, April 11, 2017. How the feds built their unprecedented case against Dennis Hastert Former U.S. House speaker Dennis Hastert is one of the highest-ranking elected officials in American history ever to spend time in prison. The former wrestling coach and teacher at Yorkville High School was sentenced in April 2016 for allegedly paying hush money to cover up accusations that he sexually abused teenage boys on his wrestling team....

Chaka Khan came into the world on March 23, 1953, as Yvette Marie Stevens—her jazz-loving parents named her after the Stan Getz song “Yvette.” Though she’d go on to become an icon of powerhouse funk, that name pays homage to white mainstream jazz—an apparent mismatch that makes more sense when you consider all the ways Chicago’s diverse musical culture helped mold her. Given all the impressive younger women in this year’s Pitchfork lineup, it’s tempting to bring up Khan’s anthemic 1978 smash “I’m Every Woman” as a way to talk about her influence on decades of future divas....

Lost Highway On Thursday, February 6, at 9 PM, as part of an ongoing series dedicated to actor Nicolas Cage, the University of Chicago’s Doc Films hosts a screening of David Lynch’s Wild at Heart (1990), in which Cage plays an amalgamation of Elvis Presley and every character in The Wizard of Oz not named Dorothy. It’s precisely the sort of barbed, eccentric role Cage has come to perfect, though the film itself, particularly when framed against the rest of Lynch’s filmography, has a far less serrated edge....

With the exception of Groucho Marx deciding which club to join, people don’t like people who don’t want them around. That includes us journalists. When we knock on doors we want them to open. Holliday and Macias didn’t get into the First Amendment question, which might mean that on the streets of Chicago, unlike in Mizzou’s Carnahan Quad, it didn’t come up. The First Amendment is actually a fairly useless weapon for reporters to go into battle with....

Rick Danzl/News-Gazette Nishana Ismail and Tim Deppen, creators of Shadow Last year, when Tim Deppen and Nishana Ismail’s friend and classmate was mugged at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the story was all too familiar: as she was walking through campus in broad daylight, two men came up from behind her, snatched her purse, and fled. Without access to her phone, the woman had to find a random stranger who was willing to call for help....

To tackle Chicago’s gun violence problem, Illinois state senator Kwame Raoul and other sponsors of the Safe Neighborhoods Reform Act focused their bill on one of the root causes: repeat gun offenders. Other lawmakers have previously proposed bills targeting repeat offenders, as well as increasing penalties for gun crimes—which you and other lawmakers have pushed back on. What makes this bill different from those other bills? There’s also a number of nonviolent offenses that we attempt to do either one of two things for: reduce the sentence, or in some cases we’ve expanded the eligibility for offender initiative programs—second-chance probation and first-offender drug probation....

Tyler Daswick: It was always about Paul. Sure, BadBadNotGood made a huge play for Friday’s most sneaky-great performance—the trio rocked themselves out of their seats in front of a crowd that grew as the set progressed—and Cold War Kids’ breezy indie rock played well to hazed-and-confused festgoers. But Paul McCartney’s pending performance cast a grand shadow over the day. Everything else was preliminary; all other options were time fillers. Even when you were singing along to Alt-J or dodging the crush of bodies in front of DJ Snake, there was no escaping it....

Prior to the ascendance of Michael Jordan, if you said “Chicago” anywhere in the world, regardless of language barrier, you’d be greeted with finger guns and mentions of Al Capone. But now the peaceful period of international Be Like Mike-ism has passed—Chicago is once again synonymous with gunfire, thanks in part to a constant media drumbeat (especially from Vice, Spike, and the like) about south-side and west-side youth violence. But to reduce these vast, vibrant communities to tragedies and troubles ignores the fact that the Black Arts Movement in Chicago has remained a fertile talent incubator....

The return of the cult TV show Mystery Science Theater 3000, which originally ran on three different networks for roughly 11 years until 1999, is an act of playful subversion. In late 2015 series creator Joel Hodgson broke Kickstarter records with a campaign to fund 14 new MST3K episodes, raking in more than $5.7 million. During a July panel as part of the pop-culture pantheon that is San Diego Comic Con, Hodgson revealed that the show’s reboot had found a home: Netflix....