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Mena Travel

In early December, the home practice organ owned by beloved former White Sox organist Nancy Faust was auctioned off to benefit Chicago White Sox Charities. The Hammond Elegante Model 340100—complete with original bench and owner’s manual—sold for $1,400 to one of the biggest champions of both Faust and baseball organ music: Josh Kantor, who’s been the Boston Red Sox organist since 2003. Hogan knew Dowd and Crawford already, and she’d met Kantor last year while she was on tour with the Decemberists....

“Nie dla psa kiełbasa,” is a sardonic thing you can say in Polish when something is (or should be) unattainable for someone who desires it. It means “the sausage is not for dogs.” Not speaking Polish, it’s precisely the way I feel when I get a craving for kielbasa and find myself in one of the city’s wondrous Polish delis, such as Rich’s, Dunajec, or Kurowski’s. These places all smell bewitchingly of smoke, pork, garlic, and spice, and all feature long rows of dangling meat, hung far out of reach behind the counter....

The Harper Court Summer Music Series in Hyde Park, organized by the Silver Room’s Eric Williams in conjunction with the University of Chicago, has consisted of four free open-air concerts between May and August—and the last, on Wednesday, August 31, is a world-music house party reuniting the creators of Africa Hi-Fi, a beloved Sonotheque residency that ran from 2004 through 2009. Ron Trent and Joseph Bryl will DJ, Sonia Hassan will host, and trumpeter and singer-songwriter Sam Trump will perform live....

Bassist Stephan Crump has established himself as a magnificent team player. He provides muscle and bone in the limber trio led by pianist Vijay Iyer, and lets his fluency with tender melody sparkle in intimate groupings including his duo with guitarist Mary Halvorson and the Rosetta Trio, with guitarists Liberty Ellman and Jamie Fox. Crump shows off a different side of his personality with his agile quartet Rhombal, which formed as a response to the death of his brother, Patrick, from an aggressive sarcoma....

Urban Pooch 4501 N. Ravenswood 773-942-6445 urbanpooch.com Runner-Up: Rockstar Pets

Chicago Sky Chicago Red Stars Finalist: Chicago Bandits

SPACE Fitzgerald’s Finalists: Brauer House, Wire

We’re not quite halfway through 2016, but our previous list of books we were looking forward to peters out just around now. Plus, Book Expo America blew through town a few weeks ago, leaving heaps of publisher catalogs and free galleys in its wake. Winter—or, rather The Winds of Winter—may not be coming anytime soon, but summer is definitely here. And you’re going to want something to read besides that new Harry Potter book....

One of the greatest joys of pressing play on a new Boris record is the excitement of hearing which direction they take each time around. Formed in 1992, the Japanese trio have dabbled in—and mostly perfected—the entire spectrum of heavy and heady music. They kicked off their career tipping their collective hat to the doom of 90s Earth and the sludge of the Melvins (the band’s name is a homage to the opening track of the Melvins’ Bullhead LP), and went on to master dizzying thrash, eerie psychedelia, glacial doom, and gorgeous shoegaze—they even toyed with J-pop on 2011’s New Album (Sargent House)....

One thing’s for sure—you can’t pin Martin Arnold down. On The Split Veleta, his volume in Another Timbre Records’ recent five-album survey of Canadian composers, the pensive violin and piano melodies wind and wander but never quite resolve. Abberare, a collection of his work performed by the Montreal-based Bozzini String Quartet, is split between Renaissance-vintage sonorities, gentle dissonances, and cheerily meandering airs. Arnold, who lives in Toronto, holds down a monthly gig contributing subtly off-kilter guitar accompaniment to the smooth lounge pop of pianist Ryan Driver, with whom he has also recorded entropic treatments of English folk tunes in the alt-folk band Mermaids....

ARTIST: Les HermanSHOW: Catfish & the Bottlemen and Wild Party at Schubas on Tue 2/24MORE INFO: leslieherman.com

ARTIST: Bill Connors SHOW: Oozing Wound, Rabble Rabble, and Dim at Empty Bottle on Fri 10/14 MORE INFO: billconnors.tumblr.com

This show is a special treat for several reasons, but first and foremost, it’s a triple release party. Staggeringly heavy Iowa City doom trio Aseethe are about to release their third full-length, Throes (Thrill Jockey), which they recorded in Chicago with Shane Hochstetler. The album addresses climate change and the rise of fascism, and proves that Aseethe are not going gently into that good night. Instead they present a gradual, inexorable apocalypse that can’t be averted once it starts to build its somber momentum....

Kitchen 17 kitchen17.com Deep-dish pizza is a pretty unlikely candidate for a vegan imitation. Can you guess why? Because a single traditional slice typically features a threatening cliff of mozzarella—never mind the chunks of sausage and pepperoni struggling against the grease that seeps out from beneath the layer of marinara on top. But the unpretentious, all-vegan Kitchen 17 in Lakeview reimagines the Chicago-style gut bomb with a lineup of its own experiments, including the Buffalo Chik’n Deep Dish, the Jalapeño Popper Deep Dish, and the Fully Loaded, which consists of house-made “ricotta,” roasted red peppers, giardiniera, olives, artichoke-spinach filling, pepperoni, and house-made “sausage....

I can’t blame anyone for holding off on listening to LA rapper Johnathan Porter, better known as Blueface, whose rapid ascent has girdled his image with “industry plant” insults, and whose viral celebrity eclipses the music he’s ridden to fame. Just over a year ago, he had only one mixtape under his belt, but he’s already realized that marketing his personality was more important for building a fan base than how many releases he put out—and since then, he’s gone from total obscurity to having enough buzz to tour in major venues....

Following the February 14 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida, student survivors wasted no time mobilizing their fight for gun control through the Never Again movement and capturing the nation’s attention. It turned out that many of the leaders were active in the school’s theater program, a fact that was “utterly unsurprising” to Alicia Senior-Saywell, the program director for the Belmont Theater District. Senior-Saywell and Wishcamper say the idea started with Daniel Burns, who graduated from Stoneman Douglas in 2008....

Sometimes it really is, as they say, all in the timing. I happened to walk into the Art Institute’s Charles White retrospective last month just as the show’s curator, Sarah Kelly Oehler, was launching into a tour for a tiny clutch of people that included someone I recognized: Chicago’s low-profile first lady (and onetime AIC staffer), Amy Rule. The exhibit features a wall map of Chicago locations frequented by White as he grew up here....

At 10 PM Chicago time on October 28, Los Angeles experimental rock trio Autolux closed the anti-Trump design contest they’d launched two days earlier. Late that afternoon, local artist Tom Feltenberger (aka Creative Space Cadet) had started sketching his submission while still at work— he ran home and finished it minutes before the deadline. “I was inspired, more than anything else, by the power of femininity,” says Feltenberger. “The movement supporting Trump has been that of a hypermasculine culture, and I felt the best way to deconstruct that was to make Trump visually submissive to the power of this woman....