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Little superheroes dashed out of the Black Creativity Innovation Studio and through the Museum of Science and Industry on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, their capes blowing and badges glowing. On this museum family day, the studio was set up just for them. First they picked their superpowers, determined their origin stories, and chose an identity. And then, of course, next up was building their gear. “By me being myself in these environments, it gives people permission to be themselves, and I think authenticity and access to authentic people is lacking in our community because we often are told we have to switch our behaviors, switch our style of speech or dress in order to be deemed as innovative or deemed as intelligent,” Mayden says....

The singular percussionist Jerome Cooper died on Wednesday at the age of 68 following a battle with cancer. The Chicago native is probably known best for his long involvement in the Revolutionary Ensemble, a daring trio with bassist Sirone and violinist Leroy Jenkins that moved easily between group improvisation and knotty compositional gambits that reached well outside of strict jazz traditions—and, of course, its instrumentation offered something utterly new as well....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Tuesday, September 20, 2016. A University of Chicago sociologist spent 18 months embedded with drill rappers Forrest Stuart, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, spent 18 months embedded with a Chicago gang/drill-rap outfit, where music and violence are inextricably linked. With the gang’s blessing to write a book about the experience, Stuart was given a rare opportunity to observe members’ lives and learn how the gang operates....

In college my roommates and I would congregate around the breakfast table, well north of noon, to take inventory of our various UPIs. Not to be confused with UTIs, unidentified party injuries are the bumps and bruises sustained during the previous night’s bacchanalia. Long after short-term memory, reason, and fine motor skills have shut down in the brain, the body soldiers on like a graceless zombie, lumbering through the festivities with little regard for its own well-being....

Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place. The Boyz had evolved from the Jaguars, and included guitarist and singer Bob Wilson from that group; Griparis also knew guitarist and keyboardist Kevin “Mack” McCann from another local band called the Knights. Griparis met with Wilson and McCann in his basement to discuss forming a Joliet “supergroup,” and they named themselves the Crystal Tower....

I love love. As a serial monogamist and someone who regularly writes about sex, I can’t help but gravitate towards the topic in all areas of my life. It’s relatable, it’s common, it’s exceptional, it’s simple, it’s so fucking hard. With more than 90,000 singles living in Chicago, it’s tough dating in the Windy City. Earlier this year the Reader relaunched our Reader Matches in hopes of regaining a classic—and sometimes successful—approach to dating....

Building community is the reason for the holiday season! There’s no better way to show your fellow citizens that you appreciate them and love this city than by offering your skills and time as a volunteer. There are a plethora of organizations in Chicagoland that need more hands to help get their important work done, and we’ve listed a few of them here. If you’d like to find more organizations, or different kinds of volunteer opportunities, a good resource is the Volunteer Match website at volunteermatch....

The palatial headquarters of Illuminated Brew Works. I could tell you what those video games are doing there, but then I’d have to kill you. If you were going to start a brewery—and don’t tell me you haven’t thought about it, you beer-column-reading person—how would you get the money? (For rhetorical purposes, I’m assuming you’re not independently wealthy.) Would you hit up family and friends? Run a Kickstarter? Beat the bushes for private investors?...

Imagine America as a gigantic mahogany table around which sit the writers of America, deciding, as things fell apart, that it was time to step up, and therefore writing—and signing by the hundreds—an “open letter to the American people” declaring that “as a matter of conscience” they opposed “unequivocally, the candidacy of Donald J. Trump for the Presidency of the United States.” And having done that, imagine them leaning back in their padded swivel chairs at the gigantic mahogany table, sighing with satisfaction, Well, that’s our two cents’ worth, and reaching for the bowl of jelly beans set out as a reward....

Two women begin with motion that is rapid and unrelenting, fearlessly yielding to momentum, whirring limbs about the axis of the spine, then creating new axes and leveraging shared weight to tumble together through space. Their endurance is remarkable. You can hear the sound of impact—flesh to flesh or floor. Though alike in stature and both bold, they are impossible to mistake for one other—each has her own center of gravity and her own texture in space, like neighboring atoms on the periodic table....

Chris Farren is the best kind of punk prankster; he pokes fun at himself as much as anything else, but is also full of earnestness. Although the 31-year-old is a punk-scene veteran, he’s still relatively green to recording and performing as a solo artist—the result of a circuitous path. Farren’s previous band Fake Problems went on hiatus roughly five years ago, and in 2014 he teamed up with contemporary underground punk hero Jeff Rosenstock to form Antarctigo....

Lionel Bart’s musical adaptation of Charles Dickens’s 1839 novel Oliver Twist first premiered on London’s West End in 1960, went on to a Tony Award-winning run on Broadway in 1963, and in 1968 was made into a hit movie that won six Academy Awards, including Oscars for best director and best picture. But that was a long time ago. And it shows. In Bart’s tunes (full of nostalgic looks back to England’s now long-dead music hall tradition), in the melodramatic story (hinging on several unbelievable convenient coincidences), and in cringeworthy running gags about nagging wives and poor, beaten-down husbands....

Inherent Vice would be a landmark in movie history even if it weren’t good. More than just an adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 novel—indeed the first official Pynchon adaptation, period—the film engages with the author’s literature on the whole, attempting a filmic analogue to his virtuosic prose. Arguably the James Joyce of postmodern American fiction, Pynchon created a new kind of epic novel with V. (1963) and Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), combining literary references high and low, probing considerations of postwar history, goofy counterculture humor (frequently about drugs and sex), and flights of formal experimentation....

The grill was attached to the rear of a 32-foot RV adorned with a painting of a bald eagle and an American flag above the words “Support our troops past and present” and “God bless America.” On the side was a Chicago Bears logo, an image of the Chicago skyline, and, in orange, “Monsters of the Midway.” The RV’s co-owner Jerry O’Drobinak cleaned the grill while other members of his party dutifully made preparations for “Packers Day....

“Have you ever used the iPad before?” This mountain of fish positioned at the rear of the dining room is the philosophical center of the space—the former Keefer’s, erased from memory with a massive tropical fish tank to enjoy on your way to restrooms and a giant shark mobile in the bar. White-linen-covered tables and emerald-green chairs are situated in a wide-open dining room that’s ideal for gawking at your fellows as if you’re looking for someone better to talk to at the yacht club....

The 23rd edition of the Chicago Underground Film Festival kicked off Wednesday with a tribute to the late experimental filmmaker Tony Conrad and continues through Sunday at the Logan Theatre. Following are reviews of seven features making their Chicago premieres this year, plus a roundup of six short works screening in various programs. For more information and a complete schedule, visit cuff.org. —J.R. Jones The Love Witch This spellbinding ode to exploitation films of the 1960s and ’70s is impressive not only for its mock-Technicolor hues and period mise-en-scène but also for what lies beneath: a creepy and cunning examination of female fantasy....

In late 2014, when Ryan Graveface launched Terror Vision, an imprint of his Graveface label specializing in horror-movie music, he’d already secured the rights to its new release: the score for a 1988 obscurity called 555. It’s the only movie from director Wally Koz, who used Ukrainian Village as the backdrop to his no-budget slasher. (Graveface now lives in Savannah, Georgia, but he spent years in Chicago.) Koz shot the movie on video, a popular choice for aspiring horror filmmakers after the rise of camcorder technology in the 1980s....

This week the terrific label operated by Chicago art gallery Corbett vs. Dempsey released four titles, including an album from singular Poughkeepsie multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee. Ever since CvsD started operating like a proper label (instead of merely putting out an occasional title related to an exhibition), it’s lavished attention on McPhee—nearly a third of its catalog is devoted to his music, including previously unreleased material and reissues of long-out-of-print records....

In the fall of 2016, I was in Amsterdam for the October Meeting, a festival of young Europe-based improvisers. As the three-day event ended and a partylike vibe took over, saxophonist John Dikeman—an American living in the Netherlands—decided that he needed a haircut. He sat on the floor of the bar and a pair of shears was handed to another musician, who began cutting away. It was a ridiculous episode, but in its own absurd way it reinforced some of qualities essential for good improvisers: spontaneity, risk-taking, and trust....

When Rebecca Baruc was 11 years old, she began to show her drawings from her journal to a teacher, Barbara Herzberg. For eight years, Baruc would study alongside Herzberg where she would focus on still lifes and draw from reality. It wouldn’t be until college—at Skidmore in New York—that she would begin to dive into abstraction, sculpture, conceptual art, and performance art. Growing from this exploration, she began to draw the people she loves....