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Nearly every day, performers fill the Red Line’s station at Lake with smooth electric guitar riffs, or soulful a cappella, or improvised raps, or—as was the case on the afternoon of May 15—a voice nearly identical to Sam Smith’s. “This is really unfortunate,” he said, looking the employee in the eye. He then pulled up the text of the CTA’s ordinance governing performances on his phone, and tried to calmly argue to the officers that as a permitted performer, he was indeed allowed to sing at this location....

Most people, when they see a painting for the first time, spend a few seconds appreciating the artwork and move on. When Arden Reed, a professor of English at Pomona College, saw Édouard Manet’s Young Lady in 1866 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan for the first time, in the year 2000, he ended up thinking about it for eight years. Slow Art explores how engaging with art slowly can shift the viewer’s experience in myriad ways....

“Looking for someone?” When he drew Moulin Jimmy’s, as the original artwork is fondly known to its few surviving subjects, Arturo (later Arthur) Teodoro Castillo was a 24-year-old contradiction—not a University of Chicago student, but part of the institution’s intellectual orbit; a keen observer of Hyde Park’s social intricacies, but not much of a talker himself; a caricaturist who regaled his friends with inked likenesses, but who considered himself primarily a writer....

Lou Reed was 38 years old when he released the 1980 LP Growing Up in Public. Though Eli Winter is just 23, he can already claim to have done just that. Live at the Louder House, the earliest release on his Bandcamp page, sounds like it was made by a kid who knew his way around a guitar but was still figuring out which approaches worked for him. Which makes sense, since he recorded it in May 2017, near the end of his freshman year at the University of Chicago....

As the Chicago Police Department plans to flood the city with nearly 1,000 more cops, University of Chicago sociologist Forrest Stuart’s first book couldn’t be more timely. Down, Out, and Under Arrest is a study of life in Los Angeles’s Skid Row community relevant to every city where segregated, poor African-American communities and aggressive policing policies intersect. The advent of “broken windows” policing and welfare reform in the 1990s, however, revived 19th-century law enforcement and social service practices, as the LAPD and the “megashelters” teamed up to carry out what Stuart calls “therapeutic policing,” a strategy that relies on heavy surveillance and constant intervention on the part of the cops, with basic services like food and shelter contingent on formal participation in various rehabilitation programs like job training and addiction counseling....

Human Flow, in which Chinese artist and filmmaker Ai Weiwei documents ongoing refugee crises around the world, is designed to be experienced on a big screen. Ai uses staggering landscape shots and dynamic low-angle compositions to frame his subjects against great expanses of sky, and when he shoots people in close-up, he excludes almost anything that might distract from their faces or bodies, rendering them monumental. The effect of this large-scale imagery is twofold: It conveys the immense number of human beings that have been displaced in the 2010s—as many, if not more, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, than the number of people displaced by World War II....

The spiky, new wavy, herky-jerky pop rock of Mente, the new album from Brazilian singer-songwriter Thiago Nassif, may remind you of Talking Heads. But the link between them arises more from shared influence than from direct inspiration: like David Byrne, Nassif is in love with the fractured tropicalia of Tom Zé, a tripped-out Brazilian genius who never met a samba melody he couldn’t turn inside out and perforate with a spork....

Chicago rapper 엔도 Endo began releasing his dance-indebted tracks in 2018, and he’s since gravitated toward a loose collective of experimental pop, hip-hop, and dance musicians supported by production company Reset Presents. It booked Endo for his first live set in February 2019, on a show that also featured rising locals such as R&B artist Hxry and rapper Mohawk Johnson. (In March of that year, Johnson appeared on the volcanic Endo single “Burn It Up....

Four years ago, Save Money rapper Sterling Hayes dropped his debut mixtape, Antidepressant, which foreshadowed the wave of Soundcloud rappers who’ve peppered their rhymes with intimate disclosures of their struggles with mental health issues. But that’s not to say that Hayes has much in common with those MCs, or with any scene around town either. On his forthcoming album, Flirting With Death (Create Music Group), he unloads diaristic raps that sometimes thrash against the beat or refuse to conform to a discernible rhyme scheme—he bends every line to the vagaries of his emotions, which makes for some engrossing passages....

Who said that October was the only month of the year for watching scary movies? Cinepocalypse, now in its third year at the Music Box Theatre, proves that Chicago’s biggest horror fans want blood, guts, and terror in June too. “The beauty of the space at the Music Box Theatre is that it’s kind of like a cinematic church,” says Goldbloom. “It’s such a fun playground for a programmer to come into and design a festival....

Cleveland’s Heart Attack Man have a good grip on what makes emo powerful, but they also know what can make it awful. On their second album, this month’s Fake Blood (Triple Crown/You Did This), they mock the worst of the 2000s emo community—a subset of musicians who dabbled in pushing an incel agenda—with the tongue-in-cheek anthem “Out for Blood.” On that track, Heart Attack Man use the hot-blooded pop-punk hooks of emo’s commercial peak to soundtrack the self-righteous narrator’s misplaced indignation—showing that they can be as sly as their melodies are big (which is to say, “very”)....

Comedian Cameron Esposito has never shied away from talking about her personal life onstage. In her reflective new memoir Save Yourself (Grand Central Publishing) she dives even deeper, looking back on her childhood in suburban Western Springs and the personal self-discovery that came with recognizing her own sexuality, coming out to her parents, and finding a home in the comedy world. The live stand-up performances at the Den that were set to coincide with the release of the book on March 24 have been cancelled, but lockdown is a good time to indulge in a read that’s both heart-breaking and heart-warming, with a heavy dose of laugh out loud humor....

Since 2007, New Jersey-born producer Kalayisa Drake, aka Kayy Drizz, has been making Jersey club, an aggressive Garden State cousin of Baltimore club—a raw, fast-paced, jittery dance sound that emerged in the late 80s. And earlier this decade, her spin on Jersey club earned her a place in the scene’s most storied collective, Brick Bandits, formed in 2002. These days Kayy calls Chicago home, but the spirit of Jersey club still pulses in the herky-jerky vocal loops and hard-stomping percussion on her latest release, December’s Precious Gems: Cluster 2....

Clancy Eccles is a sadly overlooked giant of Jamaican music who is often credited with coining the term “reggae,” an adaptation of the Kingston slang for loose woman, “streggae.” Eccles was discovered in a talent contest by the legendary producer Clement “Coxsone” Dodd (in either 1959 or early ’60, according to the former’s recollections in the liner notes of the superb two-CD set Freedom: Anthology 67-73 on Trojan Records), and then became involved in many significant musical developments during the 60s and early 70s....

It’s hard to keep up with the prolificacy of John Dwyer, who devotes most of his creative energy to his long-running and often flawless Oh Sees. While I was in the process of digesting the lacerating riffs and pummeling double-drummer grooves on August’s Orc for a preview of their September Chicago performance, they announced their second album of the year. Released in November, Memory of a Cut Off Head (Castle Face) features Dwyer collaborating with former band member Brigid Dawson (who remained in the Bay Area when he took his act to Los Angeles a few years ago), and is something of an outlier in the band’s voluminous catalog....

Ever since I was a kid spending too much time at the Albany Park Library, I’ve always been a book borrower, not a buyer. There are few pleasures as all-engrossing as that of the public library: the sanctuary hush, the rows of shiny plastic-covered books, the grab-bag surprises on the carrel of recently returned tomes. But when Chicago Public Libraries reopened amidst the pandemic, I found myself worrying. Were the librarians given enough PPE?...

Courtesy of Santah’s Facebook page Santah Santah’s new, currently untitled second LP is now available for preorder, but not in the way you’d expect. You can put down ten bucks toward a digital download if you like, or you can shell out $25 for the vinyl edition. Or you can purchase a slot in a fermentation class taught by Vivian McConnell, who sings and plays guitar in the psych-rock band alongside her brother, Stanton....

When you rank the brazen hypocrisy of Republicans in the age of Governor Rauner and President Trump, you have to put the Ken Dunkin affair near the top of the list. When Dunkin caught heat from Democrats for betraying the party’s base, he tried to play it off like he was the second coming of Malcolm X breaking free from house speaker Michael Madigan’s plantation. Hey, voters—remember this the next time you hear Rauner gassing on and on about Democratic patronage and Chicago machine politics, like he did in a column recently published in the Sun-Times....

This story is part of the Marshall Project’s “We Are Witnesses: Chicago” series. In 15 direct-to-camera testimonies, this collection of videos gives voice to Chicagoans affected by the justice system. Watch the videos at themarshallproject.org/chicago. In 2011, the Cook County Department of Corrections bolstered protections for trans women. Sheriff Tom Dart found there was no uniformity to how trans inmates had previously been detained inside the jail. The county’s jail was one of the earliest in the nation to adopt progressive policies like mandating others use a person’s correct pronouns and providing gender-affirming undergarments....

Guy Nicol Marjorie Woodruff’s Ghost Trees My favorite stops on any visit to the state offices at the Thompson Center are the Chicago Gallery of the Illinois State Museum and the Illinois Artisans shop. In preparation for this shutdown, the current exhibit at the gallery has been abruptly canceled and the gallery door locked, effective yesterday. (It’ll reopen from noon to 1:30 PM on Wednesday, June 24, for a previously scheduled discussion with artists Nora Lloyd and Christine Redcloud, as well artist and historian Frances L....