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It’s not every day you see 128 roof tiles displayed on a gallery floor, ash from joss sticks painted on a canvas, and artwork cocreated by trained silkworms. But at Wrightwood 659, it’s possible. The four floors of the museum are filled with “The Allure of Matter: Material Art From China,” a new exhibition that looks at Chinese artists working in the material arts movement, which focuses largely on every-day items like hair, plastic bottles, or found objects....

Dangerous Game Last week, I was happy to finally see Abel Ferrara’s film Welcome to New York, a biopic about Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a member of France’s Socialist Party and managing director of the International Monetary Fund. As Ben Sachs notes in his review, this is the first Ferrara film to play in Chicago theaters since 1998, so even though I had a fairly ambivalent response to the film, I still appreciate being able to see the film, period....

Disaffected teenagers hanging out at the forest preserve to smoke and solve the world’s problems couldn’t ask for a better soundtrack than 1999’s Busse Woods, the third album by San Francisco stoner-doom band Acid King. Guitarist and singer Lori S., the only constant member, founded the group in 1993 with drummer Joey Osborne and bassist Peter Lucas. Lori is a Chicagoland native, and Busse Woods is named for the forest preserve outside Elk Grove Village that served as her chamber of secrets during her rocker teen years....

There’s something irresistible about eating food off a stick. At Canton Regio, the brochetas arrive dangling from a little metal stand. It’s a setup that’s satisfyingly medieval, and it’s tempting to grab one and point it at the person across the table, and shout “En garde!” But then a piece of meat or a shrimp might fall off and land on the floor, lost forever, and that would be sad because those brochetas really are quite tasty....

Getting a handle on the music of avant-pop singer-songwriter Mary Ocher is like volunteering to board a canoe piloted by a blindfolded Sandra Bullock: given who’s driving, you’re going to enjoy the adventure, but nothing can prepare you for the rocks and dips ahead. Born in Russia, raised in Tel Aviv, and based in Berlin since 2007, Ocher displays an impressive range of influence and technique on her early albums, moving between Lotte Lenya-style avant-garde torch songs and Robyn-style electronica....

A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. A mortar and pestle I don’t make it to the practice space where I keep my drum kit often enough, but I do cook most weekends—and making a Thai curry paste from scratch in a granite mortar tickles similar parts of my brain. Sure, it’s like playing only one drum, and the tone is lousy, but it smells a lot better....

Seattle emo superheroes Sunny Day Real Estate were falling apart at the end of 1994, when they recorded LP2, an album that still feels like a comet entering earth’s atmosphere. Listening to it, I get a sense of the band’s behind-the-scenes tension, especially from Jeremy Enigk’s otherworldly howl, which seems to scoop up all the complex feelings of being in the precarious position of being young and on the precipice of stardom; many had touted them as the next big thing, especially given their backing by Sub Pop, at the time was the biggest indie label in the world....

John Fahey first incorporated psychedelia into his American Primitive approach to acoustic guitar in 1966, when he ran the tape backward on “Knott’s Berry Farm Molly.” Cosmic-minded pickers have been combining the two styles ever since, and these days no one does it better than Elkhorn. New Yorker Drew Gardner and Pennsylvanian Jesse Sheppard have been playing together under that name since 2013, but their personal and musical association stretches back to the 1980s—which helps explain the ease and flexibility of their rapport....

Brian Pastor’s remounting of his 2016 gender-blind production of Moisés Kaufman’s 1997 nonfiction play about the slow, painful judicial destruction of one of the 19th century’s greatest writers is not perfect. Some of the acting is rough. The performing space is a little cramped. The set is perhaps too spare. And it’s clear that the production has been put together on a shoestring. But it is, at its core, inspired theater....

After three months on the job, the city’s new commissioner of the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events sat down in his Cultural Center office to talk about how he got to his position and what’s coming up in 2017, Chicago’s Year of Public Art. I’m a percussionist. In college I actually had the honor of being a percussionist for an Allen Ginsberg happening. And for Hal Russell—I was the worst percussionist to ever play for a world-class player....

One day last month, I took a noontime drive to Archer Heights to see who I should vote for in the Democratic primary for the 22nd legislative district: Michael Madigan or Jason Gonzales. I’m sort of torn on this one. I mean, on one hand, I could write a book about the dastardly deeds of Mr. Madigan, chairman of the state Democratic Party—his strong-arm election tactics, his law firm’s efforts to win property tax breaks for the rich (including, by the way, the owners of the building that houses Rauner’s old firm), his helping the state run up massive debt, and so forth....

Louder Than a Bomb and Young Chicago Authors alum Jamila Woods returns to the LTAB Festival to perform during halftime of the slam poetry finals on Saturday, March 21 at the Cadillac Palace Theatre. This year marks the fest’s 20th year of supporting young spoken word artists—Chance the Rapper is another successful alum—and the anniversary events are inspired by Muhammad Ali’s 1975 poem “Me. We.” “Each year we set a mantra that carries us into the fest and lives on to become a prompt for many of the poems,” says Young Chicago Authors Operations Manager Nicole Humphrey....

Michael Gebert Nando’s Peri-Peri, 953 W. Randolph They were lining up on West Randolph street for the last day of previews at Nando’s Peri-Peri, the first Chicago location for a South Africa-based chain. Most of the people lining up when I got there at 1:30 PM on Tuesday were African-American. Was there a hitherto unknown fan base for the spicy peri peri chicken in Chicago’s black community? Maybe they were folks who knew it from D....

As drummer and musical director of Africa 70, Tony Allen was the rhythmic architect of Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat style. Last year the Nigerian drummer reinforced the malleability of his instantly recognizable approach with The Source, his first album for legendary jazz imprint Blue Note. Earlier in the year he dropped a digital EP on the label that featured interpretations of tunes by hard-bop outfit Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers, but for his full-length he fashioned a new project highlighting a dynamic blend of his stuttery, snare-driven attack with an agile, horn-rich nonet....

Mike Sula Paul Fehribach’s gumbo z’herbes Continuing our series of recipes from local cookbooks, today we address Paul Fehribach’s outstanding Big Jones Cookbook. Since the book’s publication, Fehribach’s talked quite a bit about its origin, and his role as researcher and keeper of Southern foodways. Broken into chapters by region—low country, south Louisiana, the Appalachian highlands, Kentuckiana, and the delta and deep south—with additional chapters on bread, cocktails, pantry staples, and charcuterie, it’s packed with unusual and tempting recipes and the stories behind them (salty sorghum pie, five-pepper jelly, benne oyster stew, reezy peezy, Antebellum rice waffles)....

Composer and pianist Vijay Iyer has taken advantage of his heightened visibility as a Harvard professor, MacArthur fellow, and ECM Records artist to pursue multiple projects, a puzzle of disparate interests that form an intriguing mosaic of his creative mind-set. While Far From Over (ECM), the debut from his agile sextet, certainly shares ideas he’s explored in his trio and in an old quartet with saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa (especially the ongoing influence of his piano mentor, Andrew Hill), it carves out its own driving, rhythmically limber space....

When we think about Chicago, lots of things come to mind—but not always a vibrant floral industry. It wasn’t always so; in the early 20th century this was known as “The First City of Flowers”—a distinction made possible by a combination of factors, such as being located in the center of the country, having access to a railroad hub, and counting on plenty of labor and coal to fuel greenhouses. Even though things have changed since then, local flower farmers Quilen Blackwell and Cornelia McNamara believe we still have all it takes to reclaim that title....

Just a month before David Bowie’s death, local Bowie cover band Sons of the Silent Age made plans for their next show, a concert benefitting cancer research at the University of Chicago Medical Center—the same place that Metro owner Joe Shanahan went for his own cancer treatments. Once the Thin White Duke died from cancer, says the Sons’ drummer, Matt Walker (previously of Garbage and the Smashing Pumpkins), it became even more clear that playing a benefit show was the right thing to do....

No artist has single-handedly shaped the contemporary soundtrack of the American southwest like Flaco Jiménez. Born in 1939 into a legendary musical family in San Antonio, Jiménez followed in the footsteps of his father and grandfather to learn the accordion. He formed his first group at age 16, and in the mid-1960s he arrived on the national scene by lending his heart-rousing chords to the likes of Ry Cooder and the Rolling Stones; since then he’s released dozens of recordings under his own name and joined seminal bands such as Tejano stars Texas Tornados and Latin American supergroup Los Super Seven....

The 52nd edition of the Chicago film festival includes tributes to Peter Bogdanovich (The Last Picture Show), Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave), Claude Lelouch (A Man and a Woman), Geraldine Chaplin (Doctor Zhivago), Alfonso Arau (Like Water for Chocolate), and producer James D. Stern (An Education). But what I’m most curious about this year is the festival’s spotlight on the musical, a genre dear to the hearts of many but challenged, since the 1970s, by the rise of rock and hip-hop and the heightened realism of the modern cinema....