The rather excellent cover of Green Language Guru and DJ Premier. Showbiz and AG. Snoop and Dr. Dre. Sometimes a producer and a rapper are just meant to be—this is the case with Danny Brown and Rustie. The Detroit MC and the British electronic musician have collaborated before, but why they haven’t done a full-length LP together is beyond me. Brown’s court-jester voice and Rustie’s Sega-step beats never bore, and “Attak,” a recently released track off of the latter’s forthcoming Green Language, provides further evidence that this project needs to happen soon....

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Anish Kapoor’s “Cloud Gate” (“The Bean”) www.cityofchicago.org/city/en/depts/dca/supp_info/chicago_s_publicartcloudgateinmillenniumpark.html Runner-Up Alexander Calder’s “Flamingo”

In a thoughtful A.V. Club retrospective of early 2000s dance-punk, Reader associate editor Kevin Warwick traced the genre’s flash on the dance floor via the era’s seminal records. “Flash” is an apt word, too—before the aughts came to a close, many of the best practitioners either called it a day (Q and Not U, Death From Above 1979), lost the thread (Hot Hot Heat), or became cheeseballs (Killers). Of the groups still truckin’, none have soldiered on like Brooklyn outfit !...

For a short time at least, no one is going to talk about Daisies without talking about Analogue. At Daisies Frillman’s offering eight pasta dishes, nine, really, if you count a pasta salad appetizer. I’m interested in knowing who would go for a pasta salad starter and then follow it with something like mushroom ragu pappardelle or whole wheat tagliatelle with walnuts and fava bean pesto. I’ve never met anyone like that....

Peter Coffin David Grubbs A couple of months ago I interviewed former Chicagoan David Grubbs about his excellent book Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording (Duke University Press), a highly readable and illuminating examination of the role sound recordings play in the dissemination of experimental music. In the book he writes about how important recordings have been an educational and aesthetic tool, a medium that brought him into contact not only with work made decades before he was born, but also music that was rarely if ever performed in Louisville, Kentucky, where he grew up....

The 1979 film Being There—which received a superb new Blu-Ray release last week from the Criterion Collection—feels more funereal than virtually any other movie comedy I know. Set during winter and shot with clear, chilly precision by Caleb Deschanel, it generally looks like an Ingmar Bergman psychodrama; the jokes, albeit funny and perfectly timed, seem oddly out of place. The film is also structured around death: it begins with the death of one character and ends at the burial of another, whose rapid demise influences much of the onscreen behavior in the second half....

Mental Notion Society Productions mentalnotion.com Runner-Up Eric Hoff

There are plenty of shows, films, and concerts happening this week. Here’s some of what we recommend: Mon 10/15-Thu 10/18: Chicago International Film Festival. The Reader’s Kathleen Sachs writes: “Included in the lineup are many films made by Chicago-born or -based filmmakers or else set in our city.” Additionally, “the festival will screen more features directed by women than ever before,” according to the Reader’s Ben Sachs. Through 10/21; screening dates and times vary, AMC River East, 322 E....

In the 60s and 70s, Chicago producer, A&R man, songwriter, and record honcho Carl Davis helped shape the sound of Chicago soul, working directly with Jackie Wilson, Tyrone Davis, the Chi-Lites, and Barbara Acklin, among others. While employed at legendary label Brunswick in the early 70s, Davis was keen to add a white crossover act in the vein of Motown signees Rare Earth (of “I Just Want to Celebrate” fame); according to Steve Krakow’s regular Reader series,Secret History of Chicago Music, that’s what led Davis to sign McLuhan....

Southern soul singer Arthur Alexander was always something of a square peg, making music that often split the difference between soul and country. His early work exerted more influence in the UK than in the U.S., and some of his best songs were immortalized in cover versions by the Beatles and Rolling Stones (“Anna” and “Soldier of Love” by the former, “You Better Move On” by the latter). In the late 80s I picked up a copy of the indispensable Ace compilation A Shot of Rhythm & Soul, and it’s remained a favorite for three decades....

Brian Jackson/Sun-Times Mayor Emanuel shakes hands with one of the high school basketball players honored at a City Council meeting last April. Bill de Blasio, the new mayor of New York, has been telling tall stories about his height, the New York Times revealed yesterday. He’s been misrepresenting his stature in a surprising direction: he has claimed to be six-foot-five, but is actually taller. The story, which ran on the Times‘s front page, was headlined, “A Mayor Most Everybody Looks Up To, Even When He Slouches”....

Almost 40 years since extreme metal emerged out of the pits of hell (or at least its garages and basements), the gender of its practitioners remains overwhelmingly male. But even in its earliest days, women wanted in on the fun. In the late 80s, vocalist and guitarist Sharon Bascovsky asked her friend Terri Heggen to start a death-metal band—Heggen even learned drums to do it. Taking the name Derkéta from a goddess of death in the Conan the Barbarian mythos, the Pittsburgh duo began writing songs that merge raw, scathing death metal with guttural, churning doom—and by their own account, they were the first all-woman band in either genre....

Ethan Miller/Getty Images Kenny G: Huge in China Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, amuse, or inspire us. • About Fred Eychaner, the Chicagoan who’s one of the top Democratic donors in the country? —Mick Dumke

A writer in midlife turned to other journalists this month for advice on how to connect with the Huffington Post. “I’m curious how to become part of the unpaid writers group,” said B. Howe on a University of Missouri alumni listserv. (I subscribe.) Yes, of course it is, but aside from that what’s so bad about it? Howe’s appeal reminded me of a conversation I’d had six years ago with Carol Felsenthal....

During the 2017 annual Sundance Film Festival—which took place January 19 to 29 in Park City, Utah—the U.S. changed presidents. On January 20, Donald Trump took the oath of office and succeeded Barack Obama as president of the United States; in the week that followed, protesters rallied in support of women’s rights and Muslim immigrants in major cities and small towns across the country, including in Park City. By the time the festival wrapped, the mood, according to LA Times film critic Justin Chang, had shifted....

Before I meet Kent Lambert for the first time, he e-mails me a song he recorded and released in 2001. It’s called “RP (Forget the Metaphors),” and it saw some airplay on Belgian national radio in 2002. Audience members still requested it this year when he played a monthlong residency at the Hideout with a rotating lineup of bandmates. When we meet up and drink beers in the Ukrainian Village, Lambert tells me how it’s the song that motivated him to keep making music as Roommate, the project for which he’s collected his various musical impulses during the past decade and a half....

AP Photos Mayor Rahm Emanuel and police chief Garry McCarthy are sticking to their script on police staffing: we’re all good. After Governor Pat Quinn announced this week that he was sending 40 state troopers to help Chicago police round up fugitives, city officials labored to let the public know that they welcomed the help even though they don’t really need it. This is what’s called doublespeak. “Our strategy is working,” McCarthy told reporters Thursday....

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