Since forming 16 years ago, Spires That in the Sunset Rise have been blazing their own trippy path, with the group’s two core members, Kathleen Baird and Taralie Peterson, increasingly embracing a more improvisational ethos while retaining homemade folk roots. That shift has never been more pronounced than in their ongoing collaboration with percussionist Michael Zerang, a partnership that recently dropped its second recording, Illinois Glossolalia (Feeding Tube). Spires began at the far edge of experimental folk music, and while they continue to play an ever-expanding arsenal of instruments associated with folk traditions in the U....

On the fourth floor of the Bridgeport Art Center, a 13,000-square-foot studio is dotted with art in various states of completion. From one workstation to the next, the work ranges wildly in style, medium, and subject matter. One drawing table is surrounded by paintings created by Sereno Wilson, aka Glitterman, who splashes his canvases with glue and sparkles. The adjacent desk is covered in the red and blue paints that Ruby Bradford uses in her offbeat takes on Superman....

Thanks to set designer Nick Schwartz, a good portion of the audience has to watch the Trap Door Theatre revival of Luigi Pirandello’s Naked unfold through casement windows placed right in their line of sight, over the downstage lip of the performing area. Since each window is composed of eight small panes, any given moment of the play may be broken up into 16 separate squares. When we first meet Ersilia, she’s just arrived at Nota’s apartment, delighted to the point of shame at her sudden turn of fortune....

“I ask, ‘What’s going on in Chicago, right? What is going on?’ There’s no excuse for it. There’s no excuse for it. I’m sure you’re asking the same question, ‘What’s going on in Chicago?’” —President Donald J. Trump “Before I bought the site, the Sun-Times had the biggest, ugliest sign Chicago has ever seen. Mine is magnificent and popular.” So the president tweeted in response to the suggestion that Chicagoans might not want to be jolted by his tender ego every time they gaze upon the city’s skyline, one of the great architectural spaces of the world....

Scott Stewart/Sun-Times A photo of 1230 N. Larabee Street taken in 2010, near the proposed site of Barack Obama College Prep When the City Council gets around to holding hearings on the controversial topic of race and selective enrollment high schools, aldermen might want to hear from Rob Paral, aka Chicago Data Guy. The mayor’s proposal has managed to upset people all over the city for a host of reasons, not the least of which is that it makes no sense to build new schools when you don’t have enough operational dollars to adequately fund the existing ones....

Chicago nearly lost a unique and multivariate musical force when James Falzone left town for Seattle in 2016. He cast a wide creative net as a clarinetist, composer, improviser and bandleader, mixing Western and Middle Eastern classical forms, North American and Breton folk songs, and ritual trance practices into the jazz-rooted music he played on his own and with Allos Music Ensemble, Renga Ensemble, Klang, and Wayfaring. He was also the music director for Grace Chicago Church and an instructor at several area colleges until he took a position as the chair of music at Cornish College of the Arts....

Nicole Mitchell long ago established herself as one of the strongest and most original flutists at work in jazz and improvised music, and over the last decade or so she’s put more and more energy into her practice as a composer. During her years in Chicago she wrote countless themes of great rhythmic malleability and melodic concision for her jazz-oriented group Black Earth Ensemble, but Mitchell, who left the city to teach at University of California at Irvine in 2011, now focuses primarily on long-form suites....

Behavior lawless as snow-flakes, words simple as grass, uncomb’d head, laughter, and naivete . . . —Walt Whitman, Song of Myself I tend to think of Picnic as the play we might’ve got had there been a sequel to Death of a Salesman centered on Willy Loman’s first-born son, Biff. Like Biff, Inge’s hero, Hal Carter, is a good-natured, troubled galoot: a football star at school who’s fallen to drifting over the years, partly due to oedipal trauma but also because the business world he’s expected to join—expects himself to join—is all wrong for him....

Back in 1992, just after she’d published her first book, Feminist Fatale, and became the de facto spokeswoman for Gen X feminists, Paula Kamen appeared on a panel about feminism past and present. One of the other panelists mentioned Jane, the Chicago abortion collective that ran from 1969 until the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. Kamen decided to write a play instead of a conventional piece of journalism in order to create a feeling that the stories were coming directly from the women themselves....

When Michael Jackson’s new album Xscape was announced back at the end of March the reaction was muted. Epic had already released one posthumous album, 2010’s Michael, pieced together from outtakes and polished up by contemporary producers and the uninspired, mercenary-feeling results (not to mention the rumors that Jackson hadn’t actually sung on some of the songs) just sort of underlined how gruesome and fucked up the entire situation around his death had been....

Sustenance 1/ Local coffee subscription: Back of the Yards, Dark Matter, or Metric Coffee 3/ Mushroom tree ornaments by Facture Goods Pretty amazing pepper from an outfit started by Scott Eirinberg, the entrepreneur who founded, and later sold, The Land of Nod. —Suggested by Kate Schmidt, written by Reader staff Starting at $6.50 at reluctanttrading.com. 3/ Soap Distillery Forget sweaters and scarves, Mochimochi Land gives you the tools to show off your needle skills by knitting something truly unique: cute miniature characters like tiny burgers or tiny walruses or tiny robots and really any other tiny thing you can dream up....

Two of the city’s most resourceful hospitality empires recently opened restaurants in response to the persistent ramen craze that’s swept across the nation, beginning with David Chang’s Momofuku Noodle Bar in New York City a decade ago. The fact that it’s taken that long for the Melman family’s Ramen-San and Brendan Sodikoff’s High Five Ramen to open their doors hopefully says more about the value of patience than it does about hopping on the bandwagon....

I was dismissive of the romantic comedy Sleeping With Other People when I reviewed it a few weeks ago, but a second viewing convinced me that I overlooked its more commendable qualities. I still find writer-director Leslye Headland’s arch dialogue distracting in spots, but I’ve come to appreciate the charming lead performances (by Jason Sudeikis and Alison Brie) as well as the ways in which the film subverts conventional rom-com formula....

One of the blessings of the human brain is just how much merciful work it does to soften the sharp edges of harsh memories, reconfiguring and rationalizing experiences through the lens of present-day needs and values. Take a step outside yourself, though, and critical moments past can appear so different as to be unrecognizable. Bright Half Life, Tanya Barfield‘s unsentimental yet open-hearted dissection of a five-decade-long lesbian relationship, hits rewind and fast-forward through time to highlight and reexamine the minutiae of flirtations, pillow talk, arguments, and conversations in a marriage that only reveal greater truths in hindsight....

The odds are slim that a better historical jazz release will surface this year than The Jimmy Giuffre 3 & 4 New York Concerts (Elemental Music), a mind-bending double CD collecting two previously unissued live performances by the reedist from 1965. The music dates from Giuffre’s lost decade, a period of time when almost no documentation of his playing exists. His fortunes took a tumble following the release of the brilliant 1963 album Free Fall (Columbia), a paradigm-shifting trio set made with pianist Paul Bley and bassist Steve Swallow that pushed the leader’s obsession with contrapuntal composition and improvisation to its apotheosis....

Fresh from its debut at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia earlier this year, “Barbara Kasten: Stages” opened Thursday night at the Graham Foundation with an introductory talk by the artist herself, part of the Chicago Architecture Biennial’s opening weekend events. A favorite feature of the exhibition was a set of three diazotype prints of nude bodies sitting in chairs with the camera angled up, situated next to woven figures affixed to actual chairs in the second-floor gallery space....

In 2004 2000 Ravenswood’s invaluable Experimental Sound Studio launched the Outer Ear Festival of Sound, a multivenue celebration of unconventional music and sound art that brought in important international performers, among them Peter Brötzmann, Jaap Blonk, Phill Niblock, the Sons of God, Laetitia Sonami, and Stuart Dempster. In 2010 economic shifts forced the organizers to reinvent the festival as the relatively modest year-round series Outer Ear, with most of its events in ESS’s main studio....

Q I’m a 21-year-old straight male, and I’m mildly autistic. This means that I have difficulty picking up on social cues. I’ve learned to manage my disability in most areas of my life, but I’ve recently become concerned about how it pertains to hooking up. My approach to hooking up is how I imagine most other people’s must be: find someone who I can have a flowing conversation with, attempt to flirt with them, and then awkwardly make a move....

Anyone who’s been paying attention to film writing over the last few weeks is likely aware of Richard Linklater’s Boyhood. In the past month there have been Internet think pieces, behind-the-scenes reports, a New Yorker profile of the director, and online detritus with such embarrassing headlines as “The Real Reason ‘Dazed & Confused’ Isn’t Mentioned in ‘Boyhood’” (I won’t link to it). Mainly this has to do with the movie’s unusual production: Over a period of 11 years, for about two weeks each year, Linklater filmed portions of Boyhood using the same principal actors, then edited the footage together to create a continuous story that follows its protagonist from first grade to freshman year of college....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Thursday, August 10, 2017. Park District demands answers from security firm after stabbings at Northerly Island concert The Chicago Park District is asking for answers from Monterrey Security after two people were stabbed at a concert featuring Dropkick Murphys and Rancid at Northerly Island Tuesday. The district wants to know how a concertgoer got a knife past guards from the “clout-heavy” firm subcontracted by Live Nation, according to the Sun-Times....