Cascading down from the leftmost wall of the exhibition space at the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, Diana Gabriel’s large installation Interlace (2015) layers hundreds of feet of yarn to create a 3-D drawing that hangs in midair. The multicolored piece forms a tunnel that allows visitors to walk through its center and observe the exhibition through the lens of the pink, purple, and yellow work. “I wanted the artworks to take advantage of the physical space,” said Robin Dluzen, curator of “Skimption,” a new showcase for emerging local artists at UIMA....

His caddy had been fucking up all morning, and now he’d disappeared. Denton had hooked a ball into the trees on ten and sent the caddy after it. There’d been no sign of him since. Now Denton leaned next to the snack cart, out of the sun, squinting at where the boy had gone into the pines. Denton looked up. His caddy sat on a branch 30 feet above him, legs dangling, a small book open in his hand....

Saint Laurence Catholic Church, which began its life at 71st and Dorchester as a monument to God, is ending it as a monument to white flight. Built in 1911 for the Irish of the Greater Grand Crossing neighborhood, the church began to empty out in the 1950s, and was finally deconsecrated in 2002; the mostly Protestant blacks who had moved into the neighborhood couldn’t provide the members or the money to keep it open....

Throughout its thirty-five years as a band, Eleventh Dream Day has regularly sprinkled its incendiary sets with carefully chosen covers of obscure and well-known rock songs. Since I started listening to them, I’ve accumulated many vivid memories, such as hearing them trace the seething rise and fall of the Dream Syndicate’s “Halloween,” embrace the idiotic hokum of Bachman Turner Overdrive’s “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet” (with singer Rick Rizzo masterfully replicating the song’s trademark stuttering chorus), and ripping like a buzzsaw through the Urinals’ punk masterpiece “I’m a Bug....

On its surface Whitney: Can I Be Me, which screens this weekend at the Siskel Center as part of the Black Harvest Film Festival, is a documentary about pop star Whitney Houston, the phenomenally talented singer whose career was cut short at age 48 when, under the influence of a variety of drugs, she accidentally drowned in a bathtub at the Beverly Hilton Hotel on February 11, 2012. But for its first hour Whitney employs Houston’s life story as the basis of a fascinating and complex examination of identity....

Lollapalooza is just around the corner, but this week is just as packed as a Grant Park porta-potty line. Here’s some of what we recommend: Wed 8/2: Clickhole’s Dan Davis, Comedy Central’s Jamie Loftus, and Chapo Trap House‘s Matt Christman perform in Monkey Wrench, an evening of comedy with a leftist spin. Elastic (3429 W. Diversey) hosts, and proceeds go to the Northside Chicago chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America....

Over the past week the Reader has collected these music stories that are still worth your time today. Blog aggregator the Hype Machine reached peak buzz in the late 2000s and early 2010s as an engine for breaking new artists—but as new music sites and publications appeared and blogs ceased to be the primary vector for music discovery, its star faded. Years later, though, it’s still going strong: Technical.ly talked to founder Anthony Volodkin about how Hype Machine’s attention to community has helped it maintain a strong user base....

When Big Bang’s T.O.P. began his two years of mandatory military service at the start of 2017, it felt like the future of the South Korean pop band might be in question. Big Bang had just celebrated their ten-year anniversary, and multiple members had announced solo releases. Then T.O.P. was arrested for marijuana use (it’s very illegal in South Korea) and overdosed on benzodiazepine. He’s recovering now, but the rest of the band (G-Dragon, Taeyang, Daesung, and Seungri) and their label, YG Entertainment, have been working overtime to make sure fans know Big Bang isn’t dead—shouting out the group on Instagram posts, even announcing a T....

Chicago’s annual World Music Festival seems to have settled into a new identity—more modest in size and ambition than in its early years, but generally reliable and entirely free. (In the past, some shows in conventional venues charged admission.) This may feel like a sort of surrender by the festival’s organizers, but consistency isn’t something to take for granted—and this year’s edition has an awful lot of great artists, some of whom are visiting our city for the first time....

Brian Jackson / Sun-Times Media We know that Mayor Rahm Emanuel isn’t very popular—but is it possible that Chicagoans prefer sitting in traffic to this guy? I got a tip the other day from a secret source—call him Rocky—in Alderman Bob Fioretti’s mayoral campaign. According to the poll, voters were asked for their “impressions of some people and institutions in public life.” And the results showed that about 52 percent had an unfavorable opinion of Mayor Emanuel and roughly 44 percent of respondents had a favorable opinion of him....

PixieHammer The machine of love In this week’s paper, Leor Galil has a sweet and funny story about Downwrite, a custom songwriting service cofounded by Bob Nanna of Braid. For a few hundred bucks, Nanna and his colleagues will write and perform an original song about anything you want, even how your beloved appreciates your cats, as loud and fast (or soft and slow) as you want. If music is indeed the food of love, Downwrite will be making many, many people happy this week....

During wrestling season, when the final school bell rings at Hyde Park Academy, Darren Wright changes out of the clothing he’s worn all day and into sweatpants and sneakers to become Coach Wright, head of the Thunderbirds high school wrestling team. Training takes place in an old classroom repurposed as a gym; its floors are covered with blue mats, its beige walls splotched with paint that likely covers some student graffiti....

Lay aside all previous notions of A Christmas Carol, as the Q Brothers serve up this chestnut with sauce that goes from sappy to sassy in three and a half seconds. You know the story: tightwad Ebenezer Scrooge gets served by three spirits on Christmas Eve, and his scrupulous adherence to the worst principles of capitalism fall like scales from his benighted eyes. Though money is deemed trivial in the schemes of family, friendship, and love, it also comes out a bit of a hero: a fat tip for a frisky fellow, a turkey leg for Tiny Tim....

Mayor Rahm Emanuel already has a list of educational accomplishments that I can refer to as noteworthy, including a teachers’ strike and a book ban. But I have to admit that he’s breaking new ground with his latest plan to finance public education: he’s turning our teachers into loan sharks. If you recall, during the mayoral campaign, challenger Jesus Garcia was royally ripped for not having a plan to deal with our pressing financial obligations....

When voices in South Carolina rose to defend the Battle Flag of Northern Virginia in the name of “heritage,” I wondered what exactly they thought that was. Heritage can be anything and everything from the day before yesterday on back, and what matters can be as simple as whatever it was that was stressed in school. Do they understand? I wondered, using they in the sweeping way appropriate to a stranger passing judgment on a distant place, that a century after the battle flag was the emblem raised by gallant farm boys dying in defense of their homeland’s sins, it reigned as the battle flag of Jim Crow?...

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Friday, July 14, 2017. Audit: Chicago’s pension crisis has gotten worse but the cash balance is better Mayor Rahm Emanuel has successfully increased the city’s bank accounts, but the pension crisis has gotten worse, according to a new city audit. At the end of 2016, the city had $153.7 million in cash compared to the $60.7 million it had at the end of 2015....

Much has been written about the Cursed Cubs—maybe too much. Apparently only supernatural causes can be responsible for more than a century of World Series futility. Forget bad management, cheap and shortsighted owners, superstition, and maybe, just maybe, a fan base that actually enjoys the whole cursed lovable losers myth and wouldn’t know what the hell to do if the Cubs suddenly became winners. Look what happened to the Red Sox post 2004 after they broke the curse Babe Ruth allegedly placed on them after he was sold to the Yankees....

“You talk about the Chicago imagists,” notes Scottish painter Peter Doig. “I’m not sure that I see Chicago in their work, really. I think if you’re from Chicago you do. . . . The reason why their work is of interest to others is because it transcends that place. That place represents many places to other people.” Coming near the end of Leslie Buchbinder’s new documentary, Hairy Who & The Chicago Imagists, a careful survey of our local art scene from the 50s through the 80s, Doig’s remarks startled me because I’d been watching the entire movie from my own narrow perspective as a longtime Chicagoan....