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Courtesy of Tom Van Eynde Gabriel Sierra, installation view, 2015 Gabriel Sierra’s first solo show in the United States, currently at the Renaissance Society, is a site-specific installation that comprises 14 pieces with corresponding instructions that encourage audience interaction. The exhibition, which holds no static title, changes names each hour of the day that it is open. This constant change gives the audience a chance to view the exhibition through several different lenses and stay with the work longer than the typical ten-minute glance over....

Bless Maryland Deathfest for providing planet earth with one of its preeminent annual showcases for dark and abrasive music. By reputation alone, its organizers are able to attract obscure but revered metal acts from distant corners of the globe to Baltimore, Maryland, where the festival takes place each Memorial Day weekend. For some bands the fest is a one-off occasion, but others take the opportunity to tour; maybe just a few days around the east coast, maybe a monthlong trek....

Chicago is a noise-rock city. It’s a gritty, working-class town built out of iron, glass, and dirt. It’s the home of Steve Albini, Touch and Go Records, and the Jesus Lizard. It’s never a surprise when a local band that embraces loud, grimy abrasion puts out a good album–it’s just what we do around here. But A Thread of Light, the debut full-length by Chicago four-piece Bruges, isn’t just a striking noise-rock record—it’s a mind-bending masterpiece....

Gossip Wolf would like to congratulate our longtime pals (including frequent Reader contributor Jake Austen) at cable-­access all-ages dance show Chic-a-Go-Go for reaching a major milestone. On Sun 1/18, Miss Mia, Ratso, and the gang will tape their 1,000th episode at the Promontory in Hyde Park! Admission is $5 for adults, free for kids. The Promontory will add nonalcoholic kiddie cocktails to its bar menu for the occasion, and Miss Mia says folks who come out should expect “free commemorative mementos and amazing surprise guests....

Toronto synth-pop group TWRP (“Tupper Ware Remix Party,” allegedly) have a cutesy but somewhat vague 80s sci-fi backstory: front man Doctor Sung, for instance, is supposed to have traveled through space and time to find his bandmates. Onstage each member of the group wears a costume that blurs futurism with fantasy—bassist Commander Meouch combines a lion mask with a getup that looks like something out of Mega Man. TWRP have aligned themselves with comedy groups, most notably Ninja Sex Party, and they like to write goofy lyrics about “atomic karate” (karate moves as powerful as a neutron bomb, of course), exploit sappy memories of dead pets for laughs, or breathlessly recount the murderous exploits of a phantom race-car driver....

In this year’s eclectic Chicago Palestine Film Festival, two themes dominate: the tension between tradition and modernity, and the uneasy, often tragic relations between Palestinians and Israelis. The opening-night film, Annemarie Jacir’s crowd-pleasing Wajib (Sat 4/21, 8 PM), stars real-life father Mohammad Bakri (Since You’ve Been Gone, HBO’s The Night Of) and son Saleh Bakri (The Band’s Visit) as a Palestinian patriarch and his expatriate son, a hipster architect who reluctantly leaves his home and girlfriend in Italy to return to Nazareth for his sister’s marriage....

One of the highlights of the 25th Chicago Underground Film Festival, which runs this Wednesday through Sunday at the Logan, is the local premiere of Good Luck, the latest documentary feature by noted avant-garde filmmaker (and former Chicagoan) Ben Russell (Let Each One Go Where He May, A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness). Russell has carved out an interesting niche for himself over the past decade or so, blending elements of ethnographic and experimental cinema, and Good Luck falls squarely into this idiosyncratic subgenre....

The Super Bowl is this weekend, but do you really want to watch Tom Brady and the Patriots again? There are plenty of others events going on in Chicago this weekend. Here’s some of what we recommend: Sat 2/3: The Urban Livestock Expo at Southside Occupational Academy (7432 S. Hoyne) teaches you how to raise goats, chickens, ducks, and bees in your yard—complaints from neighbors be damned. 11 AM-2 PM, freeSat 2/3: Known for his quick timing and wordplay, comedian Myq Kaplan—a finalist on Last Comic Standing—appears at Zanies (1548 N....

Valentine’s Day can be a complicated time of year, especially if your relationship can’t be defined in traditional terms. It’s 2020: who is even “in a relationship?” It’s not like you want to have anything in common with everyone in your high school graduating class, right? If you’re “dating” someone in an open relationship: Cole’s Bar Whether it’s the emotional compartmentalizing or the constant blurring of boundaries, the fun never ends when you’re hooking up with someone in an open relationship!...

John Prine’s new record, The Tree of Forgiveness (Oh Boy), is his first album of original material in a decade. He underwent surgery for lung cancer in 2013, and his characteristically cracked voice is a little worse for wear, but he’s as avuncular, funny, and wise as ever—a poet of the everyday. Prine’s influence continues to be felt through each new generation of roots musicians, so it’s fitting that this album was produced by current Nashville darling Dave Cobb and has instrumental support from a crew of contemporary players and singers that includes Sturgill Simpson and Brandi Carlile....

Sam Adam Jr., who defended both R. Kelly and former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich and has routinely been recognized as one of the top trial lawyers in America, says, “It’s obvious what’s coming here is gonna be self-defense.” The attorney says he has had success in defending a client who had stabbed his wife 15 times by having a psychiatrist testify that the action became automatic in the adrenaline-fueled heat of the moment....

Reading Daniel Immerwahr’s latest book, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States, feels like an exercise in pulling back a carefully maintained curtain. Immerwahr, a Chicago-based historian and Northwestern University professor, spares no crucial details in his survey of the history of the United States outside the 50 states. Through a sweeping examination of American colonialism past and present, including now-states Alaska and Hawaii, former holdings such as the Philippines, and enduring territories like Puerto Rico, Immerwahr paints a picture of imperialism as an intractable force in American history from the very beginning....

Sometime next month, Action Boyz podcast subscribers will listen to comedians Jon Gabrus, Ben Rodgers, and Ryan Stanger give a warmly received, nearly three-hour play-by-play breakdown of the 1985 Chuck Norris cop flick Code of Silence to a packed Chicago ballroom. And when they hear those three improvisers and friends perform a tsunami of inspired riffs, impressions, and inside jokes, in all likelihood, those subscribers will be listening alone. Over at the bar, someone has left out a cardboard box of red buttons with the words “janitor” and “kisses for Stanger” emblazoned on them, nods to recurring jokes about the show’s listenership (“Who is cleaning all the middle schools?...

If you think the album title The Much Much How How and I is whimsical and amusing, you’ll probably love the fey, fabulous, and hokey music of its creator, London composer and multi-instrumentalist Cosmo Sheldrake. On his 2018 full-length debut, released by Transgressive Records, Sheldrake doesn’t quite attain the cracked genius of oddball predecessors such as Syd Barrett or Brian Wilson, but he never defaults to the worst excesses of Paul McCartney either....

Natalie Hoffmann is best known as a vocalist and guitarist with Memphis noise-punk band Nots, but in Optic Sink, her new project with percussionist Ben Bauermeister, she trades quirky, garagey rock for stripped-back, electronics-heavy postpunk exploration. In recent years Hoffmann has been dealing with a creative block triggered by losing two loved ones, but she reconnected with her musical voice during a residency at Memphis multidisciplinary arts center Crosstown Arts. Ruminating on grief, pain, and freedoms both personal and political, she sketched out the album’s stark, synth-driven songs largely on her own, before joining forces with Bauermeister....

The Art Ensemble of Chicago have always been in it for the long haul. Founded in 1967 as the Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble, they adopted their current handle 50 years ago this summer, upon relocating temporarily to Paris. They’d already dropped Mitchell’s name to emphasize their evolving collective approach, and they added “of Chicago” after a French promoter billed them that way. At the time their lineup consisted of Mitchell and Joseph Jarman on reeds and other woodwinds, Lester Bowie on trumpet, Malachi Favors Maghostut on bass, and everyone on the handheld percussion they’d dubbed “little instruments”; drummer Famoudou Don Moye, who was already in Paris, became a member of the ensemble there....

A torch has been passed. Or maybe a bird has been flipped. Wieseltier would. He wrote back a long letter praising the Point as “handsome” and “defiantly classical.” And for the editors to use as they wished, he wrote this: “The Point should lift every sagging humanist spirit. It is intellectually serious, independent, far-reaching, spirited, and elegant—a stirring act of resistance against the shrinkage of intellectual life in our culture of takeaways and metrics....

Q: I am a super queer-presenting female who recently accepted that I have desires for men. My partner of two years is bisexual and understands the desires, but has personally dealt with those desires via masturbation while my desires include acting. Her perspective is that the grass is greener where you water it and that my desire to act is immature, selfish, and has an unrealistic end game. What gives when you don’t feel fulfilled sexually in a monogamous relationship?...

The great Indian director Satyajit Ray once remarked that, in making movies for the entire world, his responsibility was to look at the particulars of his society and find the universal. This sounds like a good formula for storytellers who aspire to international viewership, but it would seem to break down whenever they work outside their native countries. Can a director truly understand the particulars of a society he or she doesn’t know intimately?...

Meiselman is put-upon. Everything and everyone in his world is bent on humiliating and belittling him, so he plots his revenge. His day is coming. Or so he thinks. And, to Meiselman, it is only his own thoughts that count. The hero of Avner Landes’s hilarious debut novel, Meiselman: The Lean Years (Tortoise Books), is an aggravating, ridiculous being. He’s no one you’d want to know, but he’s a lot of fun to laugh at....