This is not Hum. The PRFBBQ, a huge underground music festival that was born years ago on the Electrical Audio message board, takes over the Lincoln Square pizzeria Borelli’s this weekend, with over 40 bands playing inside, underneath, and on top of the restaurant. Most of the festival caters to the noisy punk that EA message boarders tend to make (Fake Limbs play on Fri 6/20 and Nonagon headline on Sun 6/22), but the highlight of the festival is on the night of Sat 6/21, when some excellent bands—ear-shattering locals Pinebender and Peoria space-rockers Hum, to name a couple—go all Let It Be and take to the roof of the building to play their sets....

One afternoon a little more than 50 years ago, the photographer Michael Cooper wandered into the bar at the Chateau Marmont in LA and happened to run into a friend, the writer Terry Southern. Southern had time for just one drink, and then he had to get to the airport. He had an assignment from Esquire to cover the National Democratic Convention in Chicago. Jean Genet and William S. Burroughs were covering it too—their editor, Harold Hayes, had a feeling that the event might be better understood by absurdists rather than political hacks—and they’d planned to meet up with Allen Ginsberg....

I’d love to see Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s Road Show become a big fat hit, just for Michael Aaron Lindner’s sake. During the train ride down to Palm Beach, however, Addison meets a well-heeled, well-connected young patrician named Hollis Bessemer, who stirs his imagination with a utopian plan for building a city dedicated entirely to art, and turns his head with good looks and a generous nature. The two of them become lovers....

In the month since Paramount Pictures released Noah, countless newspapers and websites have published essays explaining (and often debating) its fidelity to traditional Jewish texts. It’s common knowledge now that Darren Aronofsky and Ari Handel based their screenplay not only on the story of Noah and the Flood as it appears in the Torah, but on the many tales and scholarly interpretations it has inspired throughout Jewish history (they also consulted with rabbis and scholars from multiple Judaic denominations)....

Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. • That police shut down Chief Keef’s hologram performance in Hammond, Indiana? —Leor Galil • This profile on Instagram comic Josh Ostrovsky, aka the Fat Jew? —Tony Adler

Most of us think of waves in fairly simple terms. When they’re small, they roll in. When they’re large, they crash. And when they’re huge, they just might flood the bike path that runs along Lake Shore Drive. He carefully mines his surfing exploits for broader, hard-won insights on his childhood, his most intense friendships and romances, his political education, his career. He’s always attuned to his surroundings, and his reflections are often tinged with self-effacing wit....

Wikimedia Commons Cole Porter When World War I ended and Paris returned to its full effervescence, Cole Porter was there as a dashing young American, Linda Thomas as a divorced socialite eight years Porter’s senior. They met and became excellent friends. This capsule biography of Porter I found online tells us more of their story: De-Lovely reminded me of a one-man show I’d seen at the Royal George a couple of years earlier: Hershey Felder’s Maestro: The Art of Leonard Bernstein....

Caffe Streets’ premium cold-brew iced coffee completely transformed the way I drink java. It prompted me to abjure the addition of milk or sugar in any coffee; I decided that to truly judge the quality of a cup of joe, you have to drink it au naturel. Well, leave it to Big Shoulders Coffee to make me question such a hard-line stance. My girlfriend insisted that I try the White Hot, a drink she said was perhaps the best latte she’s ever had....

Dispensary 33 5001 N. Clark Runner-Up Windy City Cannabis

4018 N. Western 773-588-0133 stickyricethai.com Runner-Up Indie Cafe

III: Beneath Trident’s Tomb Yesterday Twilight, the mostly local black metal supergroup that was founded in 2005—which includes Stavros Giannopoulos of Atlas Moth, Jef Whitehead of Leviathan, and engineer Sanford Parker, among others—debuted a new track from their forthcoming third record. Due out in March, III: Beneath Trident’s Tomb, recorded by Parker in Chicago, is the first Twilight recording to feature Sonic Youth front man Thurston Moore on guitar. He’s a somewhat unlikely collaborator, especially when compared to some of the project’s dark and heavy former members, like Scott Conner of Xasthur, Aaron Turner of Isis, and Blake Judd of Nachtmystium....

Chicago rapper and producer Caleb James is only 22, but he’s already been on a gold record—the thing is, it came out when he was 12. His father, Steve “Stone” Huff, who’s now a pastor at Safe House Church in Evanston, used to be a full-time musician and producer, and as a kid James would hang out during sessions at his dad’s West Town studio, Stone Recording. “Bump J used to be there, and I used to sit on his lap,” James says, obviously enjoying the image of a hard-ass Chicago street-rap icon getting chummy with a kid....

In fall 2015, Chicago DJ and producer Nasim Williams (or “Na$im,” as he prefers it) played at what turned out out to be the final CMJ Music Marathon, putting an explanation point on his return to music. His work teaching and coaching—and the birth of his twin daughters earlier that year—had made it more difficult for him to find time to make beats. To make matters worse, his laptop had died a few months before, and he’d stopped DJing....

Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place. Older strips are archived here.

The New Yorker‘s view of the world isn’t quite as narrow as Saul Steinberg’s. Unfettered, unmetered, and, most importantly, free access to the unbelievable archives of the New Yorker—it’s a dream for lovers of longreads. Taking a spin around the digital stacks of this standard bearer of literary journalism can be a daunting task considering quality often runs hand in hand with word count. We combed through to find the Chicago stories hidden within the now open archives (which cover stories published since 2007); while the magazine’s famous Saul Steinberg map of Manhattan suggests a certain east coast bias, we had no problems finding exemplary profiles and stories about our own city....

Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. • That Putin’s partial to Trump? —Tony Adler

Even during the most tumultuous times in her life, Dorothy Day would wake up early every morning and spend several hours drinking coffee and reading the psalms. I am not one for psalms, but in these past tumultuous weeks, I have found comfort in reading about Day, specifically the lovely new biography Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty, by her granddaughter Kate Hennessy. If it’s difficult to be a saint, it may be even harder to live with one....

This past January, local singer-songwriter Andrew Smith began taping flyers to lampposts around Chicago. He started in Edgewater and worked his way south to Pilsen, going as far west as Cragin. Smith eventually put up about 300 of them. “My name is Andrew and I make music under the name Jungle Green,” the flyers read, in Smith’s orderly handwriting. “I record music at home with my piano and Panasonic tape recorder....

Everyone in the four-man sketch comedy troupe Asperger’s Are Us is on the autism spectrum, but the group’s material doesn’t raise awareness of Asperger’s syndrome. Nor do they self-deprecate or write what one member, Noah Britton, describes as “Hallmark cards”—maudlin sketches that resemble the sports-underdog film Rudy. The company’s website shows Britton wearing a T-shirt that says I DON’T WANT YOUR PITY. Comedy-savvy audiences, like those in Chicago, understand that troupe names are usually nonsensical....