After nearly a decade selling music in Logan Square, Logan Hardware quietly said good-bye last month. After a big sale the weekend of Record Store Day, according to owner John Ciba, “We didn’t open back up again.” Before abandoning its space on 2532 W. Fullerton, the store will host one final blowout sale on Sunday, May 20, followed by a pop-up sale at nearby Logan Arcade on Wednesday, May 30. When Ciba decribes his decision to close the store, he invokes Lee “Scratch” Perry, who burned his legendary Black Ark studio in 1979 because it had “bad energy....

“It’s so hard to read anything you’re expressing / it’s so vague / we need just a little clarity,” Mndsgn croons woozily on his 2016 album Body Wash (Stones Throw Records). The line is funny because it’s so baldly inapplicable; everything about hip-hop producer Mndsgn’s music, from his consonant-clotted name (pronounced “mind design”) to his bubbling lounge funk, is obscure and wavering. Each of his three albums finds a staggering, mellow groove and sticks with it—tossing in bass burps, easy-listening keyboard flourishes, and jazzy riffs that head for outer space before shrugging and curling up under the cocktail bar....

Palestinian producer and rapper Muqata’a is the godfather of Ramallah’s underground hip-hop scene. In 2007, while recording under the name Boikutt, he cofounded hip-hop collective Ramallah Underground, which lasted just two years but toured internationally and collaborated with the Kronos Quartet (“Tashweesh” on Kronos’s 2009 album Floodplain). Since then, he’s been pushing hip-hop to its transgressive fringes as Muqata’a, which roughly translates to “disrupt.” His November instrumental album, Inkanakuntu (Souk/Discrepant), shares as much with outre dance music and rhythm-focused experimental compositions as it does with oddball beat-scene productions....

Eye Vybe Records founder Karissa Talanian, who also plays in this wolf’s fave “witch punk” trio, Lil Tits, launched Good Vybes Fest in 2014, and the vibes just keep getting better. This year the fest expands from two days to three, all at the Empty Bottle. After dates on Friday, May 13, and Saturday, May 14, the fest takes a rest on Sunday, then closes Monday, May 16, with a free show jam-packed with local favorites....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Wednesday, December 28, 2016. Book explores how Mayor Richard M. Daley turned Chicago into the “city of spectacle” A new book, Building the City of Spectacle: Mayor Richard M. Daley and the Remaking of Chicago, cowritten by UIC political science professor Dennis R. Judd, explores how Daley rehabbed the city’s image with Millennium Park, the Museum Campus, and Navy Pier, making it into a popular tourist destination....

Icíar Bollaín’s Spanish drama Take My Eyes (2003) is a masterpiece of modern Spanish cinema, interweaving political and humanist concerns so closely that they seem inseparable. A lower-middle-class housewife gives her abusive husband another chance after he agrees to take part in anger-management counseling, and though the wife might seem like the more sympathetic character, Bollaín and cowriter Alicia Luna dare to present both spouses as victims of the social order (the husband comes to realize that his rage stems from his lack of social mobility and his need to maintain a traditional patriarchal household)....

James Foster/Sun-Times Media Mayor Emanuel is playing favorites with unions. With teachers and Mayor Rahm at an impasse on their contract negotiations, I think the time has come for firefighters and cops to thank my man Sam Holloway for their relative good fortune. But his showdown with Rahm took place in the early days of the Emanuel reign when the mayor was strutting his stuff as a union basher....

New York flutist Jamie Baum embodies the title of her forthcoming album Bridges (due May 18 on Sunnyside) through a series of stylistic connections that bridge divides between Arabic, Indian, and Jewish music traditions and filter them through a jazz perspective. The recording, which is billed to her long-running Septet+, draws upon some of jazz’s most noted syncretists to help her achieve that goal, especially trumpeter Amir ElSaffar, who has a mastery of Iraqi maqam, and guitarist Brad Shepik, who deftly fused jazz and Balkan approaches in the group Pachora....

There’s something nostalgic about L’Imitation of Life. Not just because Hell in a Handbag Productions is reviving the show after having premiered it in 2013, or even because it’s based on Imitation of Life, the 1959 Douglas Sirk “women’s picture” starring Lana Turner. No. L’Imitation is nostalgic because it’s an old-fashioned drag parody in the spirit of Charles Busch, Charles Ludlam, and, yes, Hell in a Handbag eminence grise David Cerda....

Contemporary music informed by cultural traditions that have withstood the test of centuries uplifts my spirits like nothing else; in these times, it seems to hold a magic that can help us all withstand adversity. Lido Pimienta’s new third album, Miss Colombia, is the highly anticipated follow-up to her Polaris Prize–winning La Papessa. The Barranquilla-born, Toronto-based Afro-Indigenous multimedia artist recorded the album in her home studio as well as in San Basilio de Palenque, a Colombian village founded in the 17th century by escaped enslaved persons....

The Turin Horse Each Friday, we recommend seven Old Movies to Watch Now, all of which come recommended by one of our critics and can currently be screened online. Read the review, watch the movie, feel accomplished. • Marnie, “one of Alfred Hitchcock’s greatest and darkest achievements,” says Dave Kehr.

This week the Music Box Theatre is celebrating its 90th anniversary with a number of celebratory screenings and events. (Tonight you can check out a double feature of Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida and Terence Davies’s The Deep Blue Sea, two features released by Music Box Films.) These festivities serve as reminders of the Music Box’s key position in Chicago’s filmgoing community. The last old-school movie house still in regular operation in our city, the theater evokes a sense of excitement for experiencing cinema regardless of what’s onscreen....

Vince Ash hails from Hammond, Indiana, but at age 23 he already raps like he’s lived lifetimes in some of the country’s most storied hip-hop scenes. On his new EP, Vito (POW Recordings), he braids west-coast G-funk storytelling with humid Memphis instrumentals—the title track coalesces around a stuttering sample of iconic southern crew Three 6 Mafia shouting out their own name. Ash’s resonant voice can flit between sinister and sympathetic in a couple lines, and his spry performances on Vito bring out the complexities embedded in his darkest raps....

In a 2015 interview with the blog Electric Llama, Zubeyda Muzeyyen, aka DJ Haram, explains the significance of her taking as a stage name a word that refers to things forbidden by Islamic law. Haram, she says, “refers to my attempt to communicate the nuances of where I’m at—being a Muslim and being queer and being a DJ, spinning global bass and repping the motherland as an American.” A community builder in her hometown, Philadelphia, Muzeyyen is a key player in the city’s young nightlife scene; she’s part of ATM, a collective that throws alternative dance nights, and she also works on noise-rap tracks with experimental artist Moor Mother under the name 700 Bliss....

Jars of fermenting plums are the most enduring image from Hirokazu Koreeda’s intimate family story Our Little Sister. When making plum wine, you must puncture the skin of the fruit to release its flavor, and the wine may be sweet or bitter, light or heavy, depending on what ingredients you add and how long the mixture sits. Like this wine, each of the three Koda sisters has grown tart and sweet in her own way....

Oh, to quarantine inside a Polly Pocket, safe and enclosed, all the comforts of home sculpted in colorful plastic. Browsing the Instagram account @polly_pick_pocket might be the next best thing. Logan Square–based artist Julia Carusillo works as a set and exhibit designer, creating sets and displays for theaters, nature centers, and aquariums—which gives her a particular appreciation for miniature worlds. On the popular Instagram, she posts soothing ASMR “tours” of Polly Pocket interiors from her collection....

A Chicago Blues Festival favorite who first costarred at Petrillo in 1989 and headlined most recently in 2013, Irma Thomas radiates soulful onstage goodness. And our city’s capricious climate has taught her to arrive carrying several changes of wardrobe. “A couple of times before, I wound up having to go and buy an outfit because it was too chilly for what I had,” she says. “I didn’t bring anything warm enough!...

There’s a patch of ground behind the lilies in Lauren’s west suburban backyard garden where tomatoes won’t grow. She thinks it has something to do with the soil’s pH, but whatever it is, it’s a fertile spot for a different kind of plant. She mostly left them alone all summer, just giving them water when they needed it, until late September when they’d grown about 3½-4 bushy feet, their stems ending in narrow clusters of lime-green flowers laced with orange hairs, loaded with cannabinoids and terpenes....

“Nobody else has this.” That’s what Glenn Fahlstrom claims about the burger at Fahlstrom’s Fresh Fish Market, a burger weighing in at a half pound of chopped sirloin, with raw onion, lettuce, “poorman’s” Thousand Island dressing, tomato, and cheese. I didn’t eat the burger at Fahlstrom’s. I was there to eat fish, primarily. But the claim about its singularity is dubious, as there’s a suspiciously similar burger a few miles north at Glenn’s Diner, the Ravenswood seafood restaurant Fahlstrom founded in 2005 and then was booted from after a protracted legal battle with one of his partners two years ago....

John Sturdy Mannequin Men, six years before they broke up Mannequin Men, the scrappy, beer-fueled underdogs of Chicago’s garage-rock scene, have officially decided to call it a day, after 11 years of making jangly, spirited punk rock. The band parts ways on good terms, according to drummer Seth Bohn: “Clean break. No bad blood at all. We just feel that the band has run its course.” Front man Kevin Kujawa says, “We just take it really seriously, and it got to a point where we just didn’t feel like we had a grip on what we wanted to do as much as we used to....