Pumpkin pie became Illinois’s state pie this summer when, in acknowledgment of the Land of Lincoln’s status as the country’s top pumpkin producer, Governor Bruce Rauner signed a bill giving the dessert that official designation. It now shares equal billing with the state’s official fruit (the Goldrush apple) and snack food (popcorn). The gourd’s ground zero is downstate Morton, a town about ten miles southeast of Peoria. Morton—proclaimed “pumpkin capital of the world” in 1978 by a previous Republican governor—produces more than 80 percent of the world’s canned pumpkin....

AP Photo/The State Journal-Register, Justin L. Fowler Wallpaper is buckling in the governor’s mansion, a spokesperson for Governor Pat Quinn showed earlier this month. That’s because of a leaky roof, which also has caused the basement to flood. Quinn recently authorized patching the roof. Bruce Rauner last week gave another $1.5 million to his favorite candidate, Bruce Rauner, as my colleague Mick Dumke noted here Saturday. The multimultimillionaire has now given the Republican nominee for governor $8 million....

Humor me for a moment. Picture yourself in a boat on a river with tangerine trees and marmalade skies. Now, I know that’s a lyric from “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds”—but does that sound like an image that existed in the acerbic mind of John Lennon, or the whimsical wonderland of Peter Max’s artwork? In the 70s Max shuttered his design studio to focus exclusively on painting. One might surmise that another reason was that the style Peter Max Studio popularized had become passe....

Nadya “Tolokno” Tolokonnikova and the rest of the 14-member Pussy Riot posse marched onstage Friday at Riot Fest wearing frilly white blouses, athletic pants, and DayGlo green balaclavas, holding up a huge sign demanding justice for a fallen comrade: “We will punish those who poisoned Peter Verzilov.” Aside from the group’s DJ, only Tolokonnikova wasn’t wearing the signature Pussy Riot mask—hers sat on top of her head. As such you could call Tolokonnikova the face of the group, but its members clearly included different races, genders, body types, and levels of ability (one woman had come out in a wheelchair)....

Luke Fontana James Adomian Looking for something to do today? Agenda‘s got you covered. For more on these events and others, check out the Reader‘s daily Agenda page.

Are you ready to watch snark-accompanied football, eat free barbecue, hit up the World Music Festival, and drink with ghosts? Here’s some of the best events we recommend for this weekend:

“Take a moment for yourself, there is no better place than here.” That bit of Zen hubris is brought to you by the men’s room wall at Son of a Butcher, a closely packed tavern that has adopted the familiar veneer of hipster meat-cutter chic that’s been orthodox in Logan Square and other old-fangled zip codes for nearly a half decade. Signaled by taxidermy, ornately framed vintage photos, and old-timey signage, this well-worn shtick comes from owner Adolpho Garcia (Pearl Tavern, Heating & Cooling), whose grandparents actually worked the trade....

What is lovelier than Shakespeare in the park on a day in midsummer? What could be more meet for an afternoon of leisure than a comedy briefer than As You Like It, simpler than Twelfth Night, that gives you song and women for your wine and speaks as much of friendship as of love? Plus you get a puppy for your pains. Midsommer Flight delivers an interlude of fun with its production of Two Gentlemen of Verona, which follows the mishaps of young Valentine and Proteus as they stumble along the rocky course between Verona, Milan, and Mantua in pursuit of position and passion....

Unless you place a premium on melding disparate approaches within a single song, the ever-prolific Ty Segall doesn’t pull any genuinely new tricks on his most recent self-titled Drag City album, but he still sounds better than ever. Working with the most efficient band of his career—featuring fellow guitarist Emmett Kelly, bassist Mikal Cronin, drummer Charles Moothart, and keyboardist Ben Boye—Segall rips through and surveys his various modes with hook-fueled precision....

Standing nearly six-and-half-feet tall, the Swedish American Museum’s Dala horse graced the corner of Clark and Farragut as a symbol of Andersonville for eight years. By February 2013, however, the Chicago elements had become too much for the hand-carved wooden horse, and despite a few preventative bolts to the nose, it was noticeably dilapidated. The horse spent a year being carefully tended to, and now it stands fully restored—only this time, it’s inside....

Courtesy of Audible Treats Noelz Vedere May was a busy month for the local hip-hop scene—though honestly, there aren’t too many quiet months—so it would’ve been easy to miss Noelz Vedere’s Bittersweet Victory. If you need to catch up with the 24-year-old’s smooth, cool debut album, I’d suggest starting with today’s 12 O’Clock Track, which is a premiere of the video for “Censored Love.” Vedere raps about his romantic woes over a mellow, soul-inspired instrumental, while Chicago singer and Chance the Rapper collaborator Kiara Lanier handles the, um, bittersweet chorus....

Black Wine Looking for something to do today? Agenda‘s got you covered. For more on these events and others, check out the Reader‘s daily Agenda page.

No story is as deserving of an oral history as the immigrant’s tale; even the quietest one is, in its own way, epic. Something drives a family or individual out of the country they know, they make a sometimes-perilous journey to an unfamiliar land, and upon arriving the dangers—both real and imagined—seem even more insurmountable. Leo Tolstoy famously said, “All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town....

In the “Utopia” episode of Easy, the Joe Swanberg-directed series for Netflix, Malin Akerman plays a woman in charge of renovating the nearly 100-year-old Davis Theater in Lincoln Square, which began as a vaudeville house in 1918. The actual owner of the Davis, Tom Fencl, appears in a walk-through of the grand auditorium that Swanberg shot midrenovation; in the scene, Fencl wears a pink hard hat and asks Akerman how many seats the auditorium will hold....

Julian Lage and Chris Eldridge are both virtuosic guitarists in their chosen milieus—jazz and bluegrass, respectively—but they’ve long demonstrated a broad curiosity about other styles. Their desire to collaborate felt natural enough, and on 2014’s Avalon (Modern Lore) each player gently crossed the proverbial aisle—some denatured jazz manouche here, some spry pop bluegrass there, with Eldridge singing in a pretty yet bland conversational tone. The playing ended up being too polite, as if the pair were tentatively feeling each other out, but thanks to subsequent tours and further collaboration, that restraint has since vanished....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Friday, August 25, 2017. Have a great weekend! Former CPS CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett will serve her sentence in the same jail as Sandi Jackson, Martha Stewart Former Chicago Public Schools chief executive officer Barbara Byrd-Bennett will report to Federal Prison Camp Alderson in West Virginia Monday to start serving her four-and-a-half-year prison sentence. Former alderman Sandi Jackson and Martha Stewart also did time at the prison, which has been dubbed “Camp Cupcake....

Stephen Sheldon’s not an artist—he’s a professor of pediatrics and neurology at Northwestern. But a few years ago he joined his wife, Rebecca, on a series of studio tours as part of the Art Institute’s City Associates program. After a few visits he realized he was less interested in the artists’ work than he was in their tools, particularly their palettes. The neurological implications of those movements fascinated him. “The image is in the brain first,” Sheldon explains....

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s prestigious Mead Composer-in-Residence for the longest term so far (from 1997 to 2006, under both Daniel Barenboim and Pierre Boulez), Augusta Read Thomas has been an indefatigable force in new music in Chicago as a composer, educator, and curator. Since 2010 she’s been a professor of music composition at the University of Chicago, and few living composers have had their work performed as often. Her role behind the scenes was amplified last year when she spearheaded and cocurated the massive Ear Taxi Festival, an unprecedented multiday event that enlisted the participation of just about every extant new-music ensemble and composer that’s ever lived here....

Michael Gebert You drink the stuff on top, pigs eat the grain it came from—a win-win. You make beer. From grain. You think, what to do with the grain after it’s been boiled for a while? Hey, don’t pigs eat grain? Yes, they do, as do other farm animals. And so brewers have been giving brewery waste products, nice and mushy like Irish oatmeal, to farmers since, oh, Russell Crowe was building an ark or something....

Paul John Higgins The many incarnations of Rahm, as imagined by the Button Man of Bridgeport, aka Mr. X. If you view life in Chicago as a struggle between the peasants and their king, then it’s been a rough summer for the peasants—to say the least. Somehow he figured out that I was, oh, sort of critical of the mayor. Wonder where he got that idea? Which, now that I think about it, could refer either to the mayor or the voters who elected him....