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People with synesthesia perceive things typically associated with one sense, such as sound, through one or more additional senses, such as sight, taste, smell, or touch—a B-minor chord, for instance, might register as green. A number of famous musicians, including Mary J. Blige, Pharrell Williams, and Lady Gaga, have claimed to have (or are believed to have) synesthesia. The Jazz Occurrence series, founded by artist Lewis Achenbach, offers its audience an opportunity to experience something approximating synesthesia: Achenbach invites musicians to perform while he creates artwork inspired by their sound....

For their new second album, Baltimore postpunk trio Quattracenta teamed up with producer J. Robbins (Jawbox) and the Brokers Tip label, owned by Bob Nastanovich (Pavement, Silver Jews). Those familiar names aren’t the band’s only nods to the 90s—their sound draws on Slint and occasionally the Jesus Lizard—but II doesn’t feel pinned to any one era. That’s partly thanks to the honeyed, understated vocals of front woman and guitarist Sarah Matas; no matter how intense or dark the music gets, they provide a calming air of intrigue....

Sometimes I feel bad about my inability to keep up with the new talent that keeps pumping into Chicago’s jazz and improvised music scenes; there’s a steady influx of young players forming new groups or joining others that have already begun establishing themselves. There are players from both of these categories in Bison Bison, a quartet that have played a handful of gigs over the last year. They’d been totally off my imperfect radar until recently, when the group’s talented drummer, Matt Carroll—a multistylistic force who plays in the imaginative piano trio Rooms as well as in the rising pop-rock band Ohmme—shared a copy of their eponymous debut album on Flood Music with me....

A state commission that was created to help African-American families is in limbo amid a debate about whether the group even exists—and whether the groups it promised money to will ever get paid. The problem dates back to 2015, during the stalemate over the state budget and a grant-spending investigation. After the economic summit, Wakefield said, “All of a sudden, the commission’s phones didn’t go through and the e-mail never worked....

Walking into the space of Untitled (red flame) at the Logan Center Exhibitions takes a bit of courage. Ahead of me is a dark sea with a glimmer of red and an echoing sound. The projection of sound and the gallery space taunt me as I brace myself and slowly tiptoe into the gallery. Every movement is followed by a pause before I take another step. I inch closer and closer toward the red glowing light....

The awful statistics are widely publicized: More than one-third of black men in America are obese; they also experience the highest rates of HIV infection and die from gunshots at a higher rate than any other population. One in six African-American men has been incarcerated, and if trends continue, a black man born after 2001 has a one in three chance to be incarcerated in his lifetime. Black men have the highest school dropout rates and highest unemployment rates in the country....

Experimental Sound Studio is a nonprofit music venue, recording studio, art gallery, and audio archive that’s provided a nexus for creative work in Chicago since 1986. ESS has built an audience with concerts and public exhibitions, both of which the pandemic made impossible, but despite that constraint 2020 has arguably been the studio’s finest hour. As soon as everyone’s shows got canceled, the studio got to work launching the Quarantine Concerts, an ongoing series that kicked off March 20 and has since included hundreds of streamed performances (some live, some prerecorded for the occasion) by musicians playing in their homes and rehearsal spaces, out in the woods, and in at least one pottery studio....

We spend at least 40 hours a week next to them and countless more rehashing our interactions, but how well do we really know our coworkers? Laura and the Sea, a Rivendell Theatre Ensemble world premiere by Kate Tarker, directed by Devon de Mayo, examines both the false sense of closeness and utter disconnection that can come with close proximity of desks, not hearts and minds. After Laura (Tara Mallen) commits suicide at a company outing, her colleagues at a small travel agency start a cringeworthy memorial blog that serves as a sharp, Office Space-style satire of what mourning has become in the digital age....

W hen Rolling Stone profiled transgender Against Me! singer­songwriter Laura Jane Grace in September the piece included a photo of the musician, topless and reclined in a half-full bathtub, her face and breasts emerging from beneath the water. Grace’s ex-wife, Chicago visual artist and Hide front woman Heather Gabel, had a number of issues with the article—among them the narrow approach to gender it took, the flawed portrayal of her separation from Grace in 2013, and the aforementioned image of her ex, which was uncensored despite the magazine’s long history of obscuring women’s nipples in salacious pictures....

Brick by Brick” is a new yearlong exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry. Its subject? Legos! The show connects the childhood activity of playing with the toy bricks with serious subjects like physics and architecture through replicas of iconic buildings, such as the Golden Gate Bridge, One World Trade Center, the Hoover Dam, Cinderella’s Disney World castle, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater House in southwestern Pennsylvania, the Great Pyramid of Giza, Saint Louis’s Gateway Arch, and the Colosseum, among others....

Memory is an abstraction. It holds our entire history, but how much of that is our ‘real’ story? And what stories do we tell ourselves about this story? —Monica J. Brown, Artist’s Statement It’s an epic mission: YOMHN gave birth to Zilpha in 1830 in North Carolina. After that, four generations were born in Tennessee: Zilpha’s daughter Parthena, in 1861; Parthena’s daughter Ora, in 1891; Ora’s daughter Grace, in 1910; and Grace’s daughter Flora, in 1925....

There’s a difference between surf and instrumental rock—not every rock ’n’ roll tune without a vocal is surf. The likes of Duane Eddy, Link Wray, and even Booker T. & the MGs have all been mistaken for surf artists, but none of them have had that “wet” reverb sound favored by west-coast guitarists such as Dick Dale and Dave Myers. However, Man or Astro-Man?—who emerged out of Auburn, Alabama, in the 90s—blur the line that divides those two traditions (and they’ve occasionally used vocals too)....

Q: I don’t want to become one of those people who write to you complaining about how I married someone I wasn’t sexually compatible with ten years ago and now my sex life still sucks. I already know I need to break up with my boyfriend and I was about to do it when he got sick with the flu. This was at the beginning of March. I assumed he’d be sick for a week and then we would have an unpleasant conversation....

John Kass’s column in Sunday‘s Tribune touched me as greatest hits collections often do—as a reminder of good times past and a melancholy concession that the artist has nothing new to say. My own view is that Dwyer has it wrong. Four years of show trials by rabid Republicans would allow Clinton to demonstrate again what the interminable Benghazi hearings already demonstrated: an inexhaustible capacity to smile pleasantly for hours on end and not give an inch to foaming inquisitors....

There was a time during the early part of this decade when a thing called “meat butter” started popping up in food writer dispatches from around the country. I’m among those guilty of propagating it. It was the jokey way we referred to nduja, the spicy, scarlet-colored Calabrian spreadable salami that was capturing the imaginations of all those obsessed with cured meats. Chefs are still nuts for it, though the fever has waned a bit....

“It’s been 20 years since Y2K and the world is still going even if it’s burning,” begins the Facebook event page for Distort Midwest, a two-day release party at the end of February for a compilation tape of heartland hardcore. “We’re fucking bored out here in the land of milk and honey with our mundane jobs and weekend benders. Long live this decadence from here until the apocalypse!” During the house’s tenure as a DIY space, around 20 tenants passed through it....

Q: I’m having a problem advising a friend. She’s been through a divorce and now the breaking off of an engagement. To put it simply, both relationships ended because she was cheated on and she has a zero-tolerance policy around infidelity. To complicate matters, in each relationship we—her friends—have witnessed her being very cutting to the point of being downright insulting to her former partners. She has a tendency to tease her partners about their deepest insecurities in public and to express her extreme disdain for their family members openly....

A strong contender for the title of Most Iconic Hollywood Actress, Bette Davis built her reputation on tough, no-nonsense, self-assured, and bitchy characters that held their own against any man. FilmStruck is currently featuring her as its Star of the Week, with a generous selection of her films available, including the well-known and well-loved Jezebel (1938), Dark Victory (1939), The Little Foxes (1941), and Now, Voyager (1942). We’ve selected four deeper cuts to spotlight this week—films that demonstrate a broader range of her talents—along with her late-career triumph, the Joan Crawford-battle-royal film What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?...

Boka is known for lush, artful versions of essentially straightforward American dishes, but chef Lee Wolen likes to eat fairly light and simple Asian food. “Everybody at Boka,” he says, setting the record straight, “likes to eat Asian food.” “We eat a lot of tofu. And chicken,” he says of the restaurant’s staff meals. That’s no surprise for a chef lauded for his roast chicken. “Roasted chicken is the quickest. We do the whole roasted chicken here, so we always have the legs and thighs....

At a time when public-sector union advocates are sounding alarm bells due to the Supreme Court’s impending ruling on Governor Bruce Rauner’s pet anti-union lawsuit Janus v. AFSCME, some local unions and their members are quietly fighting back with legal action of their own. The case went to the nation’s highest court this week, with the justices hearing oral arguments on Monday. Perhaps it was the prospect of a Janus victory that made Governor Rauner giddy enough to make his first official visit to Washington, D....