There’s no shortage of visual art events to attend this fall, particularly during Expo Art Week, which culminates in Expo Chicago: gallery openings, art walks, lectures, art talks, galas, tours, parties, et cetera. So why add another fairlike event to the mix? Because not everyone, particularly new or would-be collectors, can afford to buy work by established names from blue-chip dealers; because emerging buyers may prefer to see artwork in a more intimate environment than, say, Navy Pier’s Festival Hall; and because tons of art-minded people will be visiting Chicago that week—so why not capitalize?...

Ausar Bradley started his University of Illinois college career in fall 2014, and he’s devoted his creative energy to rapping for even less time. But on his second mixtape, The 6 Page Letter, he shows the wisdom and humility of someone who’s been at it long enough to know both what it’s like to play a packed house and what it’s like to play only to the other acts on the bill....

As absurdist comedy goes, the Father’s Day greeting I got from, of all people, Illinois governor Bruce Rauner was right up there with Better Call Saul, the AMC television show about a sleazy, con-artist lawyer. First of all, Bruce—don’t act like you’re my friend. Second of all—why are you bugging me? I’m the last guy who’d give you a dime. Sure, his campaign probably got my e-mail address from some mailing list it purchased with the millions Rauner’s already got stashed in his war chest....

It’s been four years since the psych-laced spaceship-rock duo of Steve Moore and Anthony Paterra put out a full-length Zombi record. But devotees to the band’s canon—which features synth symphonies fueled by crisp but hypnotic drumming—will be wholly satisfied by the pair of tracks that Zombi’s released in advance of the upcoming arrival of their next LP, Shape Shift. Today’s 12 O’Clock Track, “Mission Creep”—the follow-up to “Pillars of the Dawn,” which was dropped last month—is a sprinting dirge, in that you feel like you’re running in a hamster wheel toward an unattainable Dune-like mirage....

The latest hot regional dance to take over the country is the Nae Nae, which has outgrown its native Atlanta over the past few months. The jubilant dance had gotten plenty of national exposure through We Are Toonz’ Billboard hit “Drop That #NaeNae,” and, as New York Times critic Jon Caramanica notes, it popped up in this year’s Oscars and on American Idol. But its real crossover moment came in March when Mercer guard Kevin Canevari, well, dropped that Nae Nae to celebrate his team’s victory over Duke in the NCAA tournament....

Sunday night at Thalia Hall, 20 local bartenders were onstage mixing, shaking, and garnishing cocktails rapid-fire while pink-clad spectators cheered at the top of their lungs. Speed Rack, now in its fifth year, is both an international speed-bartending competition for women and a fund-raiser for breast cancer research and education. In each round, the competitors have to make four cocktails as quickly and precisely as possible; in the first round (judged on speed alone) the cut-off time for advancing to the quarterfinals was 48 seconds, says judge Paul McGee, and the winners completed the challenge in 42 or 43 seconds....

Fifty years have passed since Fairport Convention released their self-titled first album, a charmingly eclectic mishmosh of earnest pop tunes and American singer-songwriter covers enlivened by an astonishingly dexterous teenage guitarist named Richard Thompson. Over the next few years, Fairport evolved into the flagship band of English folk rock, and their guitarist forged his disparate influences—first-generation rock ‘n’ roll, Scottish bagpipe tunes, modal improvisations pioneered by John Coltrane—into an instantly recognizable instrumental voice....

The problem with writing a profile of Megan Stielstra is that she’s already done most of the work herself. Once you read her two essay collections, Once I Was Cool (Curbside Splendor) and The Wrong Way to Save Your Life (Harper Perennial), you’ll know where she was born (Alma, Michigan), what her parents were like (kind, loving, and supportive, even after the divorce), her hopes (love, understanding, great writing), her fears (the mortgage, her father’s death, the bigotry and violence that emerged with the rise of Donald Trump), her interests (books, theater), her crushes (Pete, Todd, Dave) and love affairs (the college boyfriend who followed her to Italy, the future husband who followed her to Prague), the most dramatic events of her life (like the time her apartment building almost burned down), and the more mundane ones (like the slow, inexorable process of losing a job that she loved)....

In a recent interview with radio program cum music site the Alternative, Sinai Vessel founder and front man Caleb Cordes said his band’s brand-new full-length, Brokenlegged (Tiny Engines), is “about living with a new awareness and how that can alienate you from having contact with people who don’t have the same awareness.” Cordes, who’s written songs about falling out of step with evangelical Christendom, is speaking from a fairly liberal perspective, though in these divided times perhaps one of the few things that folks on different sides of the ideological divide can relate to is the use of language; alt-right brand manager Richard Spencer speaks with a similar tone to describe the “red pill” moment when he became a new-age white supremacist....

It’s no secret that I love local trash-thrash three-piece Oozing Wound, so any news on an upcoming release of theirs is always going to be something that gets me excited. This time around the band is gearing to drop a split LP on Thrill Jockey with labelmate Black Pus—the super weird solo outing of Brain Chippendale, drummer for spazzy noise monsters Lightning Bolt. The projects shared a bill at the Empty Bottle about a year ago, and it was those paths crossing that ultimately lead to Oozing Wound’s Thrill Jockey signing, so it was only natural for them to wind up on the same disc together....

Revisiting Andrei Tarkovsky’s sci-fi classic Stalker this past weekend at the Gene Siskel Film Center, I was struck by Tarkovsky’s audacious anticlimax, which I now consider crucial to the film’s unique power. After more than two hours of following the three principal characters as they search for the mythical Room—which is believed to grant the innermost wish of whomever enters it—Tarkovsky declines to reveal whether the characters actually go inside the Room once they find it....

In comments to be found in the program for Strawdog Theatre’s production of his 2015 satire, Barbecue, Robert O’Hara identifies a TV genre he calls “watching white people do shit.” “There are all these reality shows: watch the white guy build a house, watch the white guy fix the car, watch the white guy go around the world and eat,” he says. “Or the show where you watch the white girl who is 16 and pregnant....

When 48-year-old Joseph “Pepe” Porter came of age on Chicago’s southeast side in the 1980s he was submerged in the world house music. “There’s a very large amount of DJs who, during the origination of house music back in the early 80s [came] from the southeast side, who’ve gone on to 30-plus-year careers,” Porter says. According to Porter, each block had about two or three house DJs, and they’d spin at local parties—they provided Porter with ample opportunity to dive into the culture in his backyard....

It’s a half hour before game time at Wrigley Field, and a river of fans is streaming toward the stadium. There’s a carnival atmosphere on the street, a loud, happy stew of anticipation and solicitation. On the north side of Addison, between the Red Line station and Sheffield Avenue, a vocal cadre of sidewalk vendors is hawking T-shirts, pennants, peanuts, bottled water, and tickets by the fistful. Mark Weinberg, one of Left Field Media’s attorneys and a veteran of a similar lawsuit that established his right to sell a book critical of Blackhawks management outside the United Center, says the context for this battle includes the park makeover, the related ceding of public sidewalks on Waveland and Sheffield to the Cubs, and a concern that the area will be sanitized and in effect Disneyfied....

The Death of Mr. Lazarescu The 2014 Cannes Film Festival, led by jury president Jane Campion, will release its lineup this Thursday, and, per usual, there’s lots of speculation about which films will compete for the top prize. But for over a decade, the more interesting category at Cannes hasn’t been the Palme d’Or but the Un Certain Regard, which has already announced the first film in its lineup: Marie Amachoukeli, Claire Burger, and Samuel Theis’s directorial debut, Party Girl....

Owen Keehnen remembers the Belmont Rocks like he was there yesterday. On summer afternoons in the mid-1980s, he would stroll up the lakefront from Diversey Harbor. As he approached Belmont Avenue, he’d see a large grassy expanse punctuated on one side by a series of tiered limestone blocks that separated the city from Lake Michigan. Sprawled out along the grass and rocks, men cruised and canoodled. Some were clad in Speedos....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Friday, August 11, 2017. Have a great weekend! Hobos gang leader sentenced to 40 years in prison Gregory “Bowlegs” Chester, the alleged head of the Hobos street gang, was sentenced to 40 years in prison Thursday. Chester and five other alleged leaders of the gang were convicted on “racketeering conspiracy charges alleging the gang carried out eight murders over a decade,” the Tribune reports....

Eli Burke came to Chicago from Tucson in summer 2003 to study at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, but a friend from Arizona who’d already moved here had other plans. Burke (then going by Liz) had played bass in Tucson with drummer Stephanie Levi in a punk band called 8 Inch Betsy, and once they both lived in Chicago, Levi spent months trying to get Burke to come practice with her....

For all the contributions that bassist and composer Matt Ulery makes to the Chicago jazz scene—whether via his own music or via platforms he creates—he rarely pats himself on the back. He’s not a gratuitous self-promoter either, preferring to let his music speak for itself. And there’s a lot of it to speak: the brand-new Sifting Stars is Ulery’s eighth album as a bandleader since his debut in 2008. He also plays as a sideman in uncountable groups (ad hoc as well as established), leads weekly jams at the Whistler with drummer Quin Kirchner, and runs his own label, Woolgathering Records....

Since January 29, the most popular song in the country has been Katy Perry’s “Dark Horse,” featuring Juicy J. Considering the amount of shake-up happening in the upper reaches of the Hot 100, it’s an impressive showing, but for such a successful song it seems strangely unloved. After being on the Hot 100 for 21 weeks it doesn’t even have an official video (although one is scheduled to drop Thursday), and despite having a time line full of devout poptimists, I can’t remember seeing a single tweet about it....