Hi there 🤖 👋

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....

Mike Sula Pepperoni and sweet pepper, Roxie’s by the Slice One of my very favorite things about the restaurants in Brendan Sodikoff’s Hogsalt Hospitality empire is the consistent excellence of the bread. OK, I’m not such a fan of the doughnuts. But the cross-platform enjoyability of the hearty sourdough batards at Bavette’s, the crusty grilled bread served with the bone marrow at Maude’s and Gilt Bar, the shellacked egg bun of the fried bologna sandwich at Au Cheval, and the fennel-sesame sourdough at Cocello all make me question why the company hasn’t opened a bakery yet....

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....

Dream a Little Dream and Ain’t She Sweet by Susan Elizabeth Phillips Blue Eyed Devil and Devil in Winter by Lisa Kleypas Thomas is by strong consensus acknowledged as the best wordsmith in the genre. Her prose is complex and delightful, and she plays the language like a finely tuned instrument. Her characters are layered and conflicted, and they actually make huge damning mistakes—something we don’t see much of in romance....

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....

Through 10/22: What is it to be a black, masculine body? Zimbabwe-born performance artist Nora Chipaumire grapples with this question in the piece Portrait of Myself as My Father at the Dance Center of Columbia College (1306 S. Michigan). In an interview with the Reader‘s Matt de la Peña, she says ”reconciling my relationship with my father means reconciling my relationship with a black man. And that’s a minefield.” 7:30 PM Sat 10/22: If you’ve been wishing that your vote had the power to put a labradoodle in the White House, the Mutt Strutt (Southport and Newport) is the thing for you....

It’s Tuesday, the day Tenth Ward alderman Sue Sadlowski Garza sets aside for constituents to drop in and tell her what’s on their minds. Garza sits in her swivel chair in the back room of her southeast-side ward office, preparing to meet her people. As a joke, I tell her she’s the new Eddie Vrdolyak, ready to hold court. That draws a laugh. Vrdolyak and Garza have virtually nothing in common, other than the fact they both got elected alderman of the Tenth Ward....

ARTIST: Sean Whittaker SHOW: Chasms, Devon Church, Kill Scenes, and DJ Philly Peroxide at the Empty Bottle on Fri 5/24 MORE INFO: psychictapes.com

During the first week of isolation, I decided now was as good a time as any to finally watch The Sopranos. Then something strange happened. My social media feeds were overflowing with others doing the same thing—all Chicago-based millennials who were diving into the world of Tony Soprano and Dr. Melfi and the Bada Bing! for the very first time. It’s a prestige show often cited as the greatest of all time, a road map for all prestige dramas and other beloved series since....

The loss of confrontational front man and artist Alan Vega in July 2016 could’ve spelled the end of all performances related to transgressive duo Suicide, but Martin Rev, the remaining half of the synth-punk pioneers, has seemingly been on a musical pilgrimage, playing solo shows and making festival appearances across the U.S. and Europe. I was lucky enough to open for him at the Owl in Logan Square in September 2015....

It’s instructive to observe how most local news outlets covered Ken Griffin’s $10 million handout to Chicago law enforcement. CPD officials partly credit a recent decline in gun violence to the support centers (through March, the number of homicides in Chicago was down 17 percent) but the truth is no one knows for sure why Chicago’s homicide rate spiked two years ago and has dropped to pre-2016 levels in the past year....

Eric Garneau keeps playing Pandemic Legacy. And as the director of games and retail at the Chicago Board Game Cafe, he has access to more games than most. “I know it sounds kind of morbid, but it feels like a way to have some sort of modicum of control over everything.” While we can’t yet gather inside the cafe, Garneau passed along suggestions for game and food and drink pairings to recreate the magic in your own living room, dining room, kitchen, or wherever you choose to settle these days....

In January 2009, a US Airways flight that had just lifted off from LaGuardia collided with a flock of geese that took out both its engines, and the plane began losing altitude over the Bronx. The veteran pilot, Captain Chesley Sullenberger, decided that the plane would never reach an airport runway in time and instead staged a perfect water landing on the Hudson River, from which the passengers and crew were rescued....

Since hip-hop seized control of pop music, artists such as Juice Wrld, Lil Nas X, and Lil Tecca have rocketed to fame with little industry experience. Even among this wave of fast-breaking acts, 22-year-old Cordae Dunston—aka YBN Cordae—has cut a distinctive path. While growing up in Prince George’s County, Maryland, in the mid-2010s, Cordae released a few mixtapes as Entendre, which he’d later call “the worst rap name in history.” He enrolled at Towson University in 2015, got a job at a nearby TGI Friday’s, and numbed himself on Xanax—until three years later, when he dropped out, quit the restaurant, and embraced some rappers from the YBN collective whom he’d befriended through social media....

Listening to modern traditional metal can sometimes be a little like meeting up with a special old flame. It’s a blast until you’re eventually reminded why it didn’t work out for the long haul—you moved on with your life while they seemed to stay suspended in time, and the little things you once adored now feel stale or ridiculously corny. But every so often, a band knock it out of the park so hard that they prove 70s-90s metal sounds to be every bit as timeless and cool as James Dean in a pair of Levis (or insert your own iconic imagery here) even as they expand its language....

About three-quarters of the way through Rich Cohen’s new book The Chicago Cubs: Story of a Curse comes an epic clash of baseball philosophies and worldviews. It was not always thus, Cohen reminds us. In the beginning, the Cubs (previously the White Stockings, Colts, Spuds, and Microbes) were one of the best teams in Major League Baseball, winners of three consecutive National League pennants, possessors of a deadly efficient infield and a star pitcher who’d learned how to use his mangled left hand to throw a wicked curveball....

This week’s featured gig poster advertises this weekend’s Chicago Jazz String Summit, two evenings of streaming performances by string players working in jazz, improvisation, and experimental music. It’s the seventh year for this celebration of stringed instruments in nonclassical forms, founded by cellist, composer, and longtime Chicagoan Tomeka Reid. The poster and the summit’s logo were created by designer, illustrator, and musician Rei Alvarez, a Puerto Rican native who DJs as Rattan DJ and founded bolero-focused ensemble Miramar....