Eataly Gene’s Sausage Shop & Delicatessen Finalists: Chicago French Market, Local Foods, Olivia’s Market

Brianna Wellen: The second I heard Car Seat Headrest play David Bowie’s “Blackstar,” my hopes were high for this weekend. Immediately after that, though, it started pouring. But that’s the fickle nature of Pitchfork, or really any good outdoor music festival: brilliant and thrilling one moment, bleak and rainy the next. Thankfully, as the day continued, it seemed this year’s fest would start on an upswing. Twin Peaks were charming and rocking as ever....

Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago. “I love the 70s,” Nikki Milan Houston says. A fan of blaxploitation films and Jane Birkin, 18-year-old Houston recently moved from a small beach town in California to study directing and screenwriting at Columbia College. “Between the perfect bell-bottoms, loafers, fur coats, and minidresses, [Birkin] has the exact effortless look that I’ve always admired,” she says....

In 1970, a new local gay liberation organization, energized by the uprising at Stonewall, rented the annex of the Chicago Coliseum near 16th and Wabash for the first public queer dance in the city—two months before its first Pride parade. Almost 50 years later, that event has inspired Red Bull Presents: Renaissance One, a south-side dance party this Thursday organized in collaboration with local Black-femme-focused promoters Party Noire. Renaissance One featuring BbyMutha, TT the Artist, Kidd Kenn, and Blu Bone, plus DJ sets by Rae Chardonnay, Hijo Pródigo, and Professor-Wrecks Thu 6/27, 8 PM, the Promontory, 5311 S....

Last weekend, I watched Ryan Murphy’s Netflix production of The Boys in the Band, adapted from Mart Crowley’s groundbreaking 1968 off-Broadway play about a group of gay male friends at a birthday party who confront each other over drinks and struggle with the (pre-Stonewall) internalized hatred of living in a deeply homophobic society. It became the first commercially successful American play in which all the characters were gay men (though not all the actors in that first production were gay)....

Queen! Slo ‘Mo Finalists: Party Noire, Bizarre Love

Improvised Jane Austen Improvised Dungeons and Dragons Finalists: Las Tinas Improv Telenovelas, Comedy Dance Collective

Multigenerational improvising trio J@K@L is one of the more exciting ensembles to emerge in Chicago over the last few years. Fueled by the energy of the young drummer Julian Kirshner, the group benefits from the vast experience and disparate aesthetics of reedist Keefe Jackson and cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm. The latter left Chicago last year, and though the scene has weathered plenty of such departures over the years, it’s always heartening when players return and continue their work in local outfits....

Pixies show at Metro 6/10/15 Credit: Bobby TalamineCredit: Bobby TalamineCredit: Bobby TalamineCredit: Bobby TalamineCredit: Bobby TalamineCredit: Bobby TalamineCredit: Bobby TalamineCredit: Bobby TalamineCredit: Bobby TalamineCredit: Bobby TalamineCredit: Bobby TalamineCredit: Bobby TalamineCredit: Bobby TalamineCredit: Bobby TalamineCredit: Bobby TalamineCredit: Bobby TalamineCredit: Bobby TalamineCredit: Bobby Talamine1 / 18 Pixies show at Metro 6/10/15

Chicago rockers Case make wispy, folky, heart-on-sleeve songs well-suited for coffeehouses and 2000s indie bands. Their style isn’t exactly en vogue, but the five-piece are skilled enough to draw on disparate sounds that could appeal to listeners who typically find indie rock stuffy. On “So Much It Could Be; So Little Is,” off the 2018 EP Questions of Space, front man Cale Zepernick sings in a soft falsetto (he sounds a little like Mike Milosh of Rhye) that underlines the sumptuous R&B vibe of the shimmying acoustic guitars....

The world of quarantine is paradoxical, with our immediate environments smaller and more constrained even as the big existential issues grow ever more ominous. What does it mean to live, to love, to dream in such circumstances? Just seeing a crowd of people gathering on a sunny day in West Town’s Walsh Park is enough to trigger nostalgia in a time of pandemic. But the show also begins with the cast giving a rapid-fire rundown of “everything we remember that we love about Chicago....

“You take a picture, but you make a drawing.” Visual artists are rarely gifted verbally. There’s a good reason why they gravitate toward modes of expression that don’t necessitate explanation. So Sillman is a rare bird. I’d put her writing on the same shelf as Fairfield Porter’s and Manny Farber’s—painters who were legitimate writers. There aren’t many. Nor should there be. If someone’s gifted in one field it seems greedy and unfair that they should excel in another....

Psychic 9-5 Club Smart Bar boasts a ridiculously stacked sequence of bookings this week. Tomorrow night local footwork legend (and Teklife crew member) Gant-Man headlines, and on Saturday the mighty Detroit techno artist Carl Craig stops by for what promises to be a spectacular DJ set. But I’m slightly more intrigued by the live performance of Australian duo HTRK, who stop by the basement club on Thursday night.

Pizzeria Uno Iguana Bistro + Cafe Finalist: Funkenhausen

Chicago Music Exchange 3316 N. Lincoln 773-525-7773 chicagomusicexchange.com Runner-Up: Old Town School Music Store

Shannon Noll Matt Castellvi Finalist: Mike Hover

Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago. Irene Flores drew a small crowd in Humboldt Park earlier last month while dancing to the sounds of Colombian band Herencia de Timbiquí during the World Music Festival. An enthusiastic attendee of the city’s Summer Dance series, Flores has had plenty of time to practice her moves. The Edgewater resident—her age, she quips, is a “military secret”—makes a point to visit every festival in town, and the two hours she spends settling on just the right attire for each event is “definitely worth it,” she says....

The Elgin mural is not the Elgin Marbles. Those Greek sculptures were infamously taken from the Parthenon to the British Museum 200 years ago, sparking a debate that still rages. But the story of this 21st-century Illinois painting, American Nocturne, with its disputed motives and retrospectively outraged public, is at least as complicated. A decade ago, Beitler’s photograph also inspired Elgin artist David Powers, then working on the last in a series of murals the city had commissioned from the Outside Exhibition Group, a small arts organization that’s no longer active....