Three years ago, Cory Hanson’s LA band Wand released three albums of melodically rich psych-rock in 13 months. The group then fell silent, but Hanson didn’t slow down: last year he dropped his first solo record, The Unborn Capitalist From Limbo (Drag City), whose muted chamber-pop employs more elaborate arrangements than Wand’s old material. This approach bleeds beautifully into the band’s new release Plum (Drag City), performed by an agile five-piece that gracefully pivots from dreamy pop tunes to slashing hard rock....

Englewood MC Darrel Mckinney makes music as DaWeirdo, which is a pretty obvious clue that his approach is unusual. He warps his raps with animated squeaks that leap out of his mouth a couple times per line; at his wildest, he sounds like a bristling cat clinging desperately to a shoddy roller coaster. Mckinney’s vocal affectations can be unsettling, but that’s the point: he raps about systemic racism and disinvestment in Chicago’s Black communities, and his teetering flow and deliberately unstable inflections amplify the painful surreality of facing a world that constantly tells you that you’re disposable....

A slender woman in a leather catsuit posed gracefully on a crowded convention show floor—her whip gripped in an outstretched hand as if ready to strike. She smirked as a trio of men holding smartphones snapped a quick photo of her. Granted, porn stars autographing photos of their own bare breasts for eager middle-aged couples or vendors hawking bath soap in the shape of dicks and vaginas is bit more risque than, say, superheroes clad in snug spandex at Wizard World—but the difference is fewer than 50 shades of grey....

Chicago sound artist, multi-instrumentalist, and noise weirdo Angel Marcloid creates meticulously teetering collages out of vivisected bits of various incongruous genres under several different monikers. She’s already put out two albums this year: March’s Bubble Universe! (Hausu Mountain), where she appears as Nonlocal Forecast, has a gently frothy ambience that verges on jazzy fusion before sliding into semi-ironic new age. Tonight she celebrates the second album, the recent Field Whispers (Into the Crystal Palace), released under the name Fire-Toolz by the Orange Milk label....

Stories of C.K. behaving in this way have been floating around for years. A 2012 Gawker post, filed under the tag “blind item” and headlined “Which Beloved Comedian Likes to Force Female Comics to Watch Him Jerk Off?,” describes a rumor about a female comedy duo’s encounter with a “our nation’s most hilarious stand-up comic and critically cherished sitcom auteur.” The details of the incident in the Gawker item are remarkably similar to the event Goodman and Wolov recount in the Times story: As soon as they sat down in his room, still wrapped in their winter jackets and hats, Louis C....

It is a testament to the power of art when a fictional film can change how an entire country addresses LGBTQ+ rights. Such is the case with And Then We Danced, whose screening in the country of Georgia led to antagonistic riots and ultimately shed light on marginalized communities. Director Levan Akin’s beautiful love story is set to traditional Georgian dance and music, as Merab, a young competitive dancer, puts his future in jeopardy when he falls for a talented fellow male dancer....

It’s really not a question of whether the building was worthy of designation,” then-alderman Edwin P. Fifielski said of the Chicago Stock Exchange Building in 1971, months before it was demolished for a modern office building, 30 N. LaSalle. “It was a matter of weighing the aesthetic value of the building with the money involved to buy and maintain it. It would be true of any landmark in the city.”...

“Wow, this is very 2012 dubstep,” my 16-year-old quipped when he heard Demigod (Kannibalen), the latest album from DJ and producer Kai Wachi. Sure enough, Wachi did get his start that year, and he’s been keeping the faith ever since—which my son and I agree isn’t such a bad thing. The title track doesn’t exactly smash any Skrillex paradigms, but the sound is enormous: synths rev up to thrash-metal speeds and beats drop from great heights to smash open with a screech of filthy static....

This autumn marks 30 years since Ken Vandermark moved to Chicago. The reedist plays tenor and baritone saxophones as well as B-flat and bass clarinets, and his staggering output—he’s put out six releases this year alone, one of them a five-disc set—can be divided and analyzed according to any number of metrics, including where he spent most of his time while producing the material. Early on, he mostly played in Chicago, gigging frequently around town in various ensembles....

I wonder what childless people do for terror. Since my two sons were born, all my worst fears have revolved around their lives. Not their natures or their choices but their lives. Though they’re both fully grown and self-sufficient now, the possibility of . . . something terrible . . . befalling either of them still scares me so much that I can’t bring myself to call that something by its right name here....

Moby-Dick ranks up there with the Bible on the short list of literary masterpieces that are very nearly unreadable. Like the Good Book, Herman Melville’s 1851 novel about the doomed voyage of the Pequod is cosmic in scope, rich in interpretive possibilities, extraordinarily powerful in places, and, for long stretches, tedious beyond imagining. Captain Ahab may have been single-minded in his pursuit of the white whale that done him wrong, but his creator tends to get distracted, repeatedly breaking away from the narrative to teach us lessons on sailing and the finer points of cetology....

Tomorrow night Doc Films will screen Days and Nights in the Forest, one of Indian director Satyajit Ray’s greatest accomplishments, and on Friday Hong Sang-soo’s minimalist Grass opens at the Gene Siskel Film Center for a weeklong run. What do these movies have in common? For one thing neither seems particularly interested in storytelling—both feel like collections of social observations, organized around the characters’ unforced behavior. (Both films are, in fact, exquisitely written, developing themes and even subtle suspense through the careful sequencing of nonevents....

Philadelphia guitarist Nick Millevoi juggles disparate approaches to music, including aggressive prog rock in Many Arms and post-Television-style melodicism in Solar Motel Band (where he plays foil to Chris Forsyth), but the element that usually holds them together is that his sounds conjure emotions stoked by ephemeral sorts of nostalgia. He’s as much a jazz musician as he is a rock player, and though he’s dug into both traditions he’s definitely found his sweet spot leading the instrumental Desertion Trio with bassist Ben Rosen and drummer Kevin Shea (Talibam, Mostly Other People Do the Killing)....

Most people in Chicago don’t consider Japanese food in regional terms, but when Koichiro “K.C.” Kimori was plotting to open Umacamon, his Rolling Meadows restaurant, he was thinking about his hometown, Fukuoka. There are plenty of Kyushu favorites, but Umacamon isn’t simply a specialist. With more than a hundred items on the menu, it offers a dizzying selection of sushi, yakitori, and shareable drinking dishes. At lunchtime the focus narrows to sushi and homey comfort foods—donburi, noodles, curry rice plates, and a few yōshoku (Western-style) dishes such as the demiglace-glazed burger patty, more meat loaf than sandwich, and the fried rice-wrapped omelet omurice....

The cover of the Atlantic that just came in the mail pimps the lead story inside with a headline that shouts . . . Fallows, a draft dodger during the Vietnam war who’s been thinking about that performance ever since, is a serious student of the American military, and, aside from the fact it’s not wildly original, I’ve got no problem with his actual thesis as framed by himself, not his headline writer....

When something as shocking and anguishing as Tuesday night’s election happens, it’s sure to be felt as a massive failure of communications. Why didn’t the ignorant know better? we wonder. How could they refuse to know better? Could it have been all those “false equivalencies” the media were peddling—the ones we saw through in a second yet were so impenetrable to anybody who wasn’t us? Someone else said she thought the last week of the Clinton campaign was most odd, a series of quiet rallies in small settings leading up to the ultimate blowout in Philadelphia....

A Romeo and Juliet story set in England in 1645, Vincenzo Bellini’s I Puritani is all about the bel canto music. It has a stagnant libretto, a mad maiden “scene” that drags over three acts, and a happy ending. Lyric Opera presents a stodgy 42-year-old production borrowed from the Met. See it for its sterling vocalists, especially tenor Lawrence Brownlee as Arturo and soprano Albina Shagimuratova as his true love, Elvira (a part famously, and probably more histrionically, sung at Lyric by Maria Callas)....

The first time the City Council had a chance to vote on funding the Marriott/DePaul boondoggle, Mayor Emanuel gaveled the deal so fast that most aldermen didn’t even know what happened. At last Monday’s finance committee hearing, the mayor had to pull a request to appropriate about $5 million for the project in the face of heated opposition from even some of his most loyal rubber-stampers. Thanks a lot for nothing, aldermen....

Sjel Chicago harpist Omar Coleman plays Rosa’s Lounge on Sunday. The city’s blues clubs will be going strong throughout the festival, and at least a few venues that don’t typically focus on the blues will get in on the action. On Saturday, Reggie’s Music Joint hosts Muddy Waters’s son Mud Morganfield, a participant in Sunday’s Muddy tribute at Petrillo; on Sunday evening, Chicago elder statesman Jimmy Johnson will hold forth there....

If you’ve never experienced Wovenhand live, I highly recommend taking this opportunity to remedy that. This Colorado-based roots-rock quartet, fronted by singer-songwriter David Eugene Edwards (who previously led the singularly great country-gothic roots-rock band 16 Horsepower), play with a tent-revival fervor that’ll have your hair standing on end—you’ll be ready to believe Edwards just got done hallucinating in the desert for 40 days and 40 nights. Mysterious to the last, they play their cards close to their chest, but they’ve nearly finished their ninth studio album, the follow-up to 2016’s Star Treatment (a short video posted to Facebook hints at something spectacular), and they’ll preview new material on this tour....