Most of the music I share in my weekly 12 O’Clock Track posts has a certain poplike concision, even when it’s far from pop. I appreciate work that’s intensely focused, without wasted notes or gestures. But I also love music that’s wide open and takes its time getting to its destination—or in the case of today’s post, that never has a destination. Coils on Malbec (Shinkoyo) is a slow-moving experiment conducted by Argentine musician Alan Courtis (perhaps best known from his membership in the long-running Reynols) and Chicago-area native Cyrus Pireh (who lives in Duluth, Minnesota)....

It’s hard not to hear Real Enemies (New Amsterdam), the recent album by Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society, in a new light this week. The third album from the ambitious New York composer and bandleader uses the idea of conspiracy theories as a conceptual framework, examining the tendency of the postwar U.S. to embrace them to explain political, social, and economic conditions and movements. There’s been no shortage of fresh conspiracy theories during this election season, applied to both campaigns—the fanciful notion that the liberal media were colluding to cripple Trump, for instance, or the slightly more plausible claim that the DNC worked to discredit Bernie Sanders during the primaries....

Mama Bird Recordings in Portland, Oregon, has been positioning itself at the center of the transcendental hippie coffee shop scene by releasing album after album of dreamy, meditative folk. In early March they added a new highlight to their catalog with the debut album by Haley Heynderickx, I Need to Start a Garden. Heynderickx has a knack for hitting folksy cliches dead-on for true believers, then sliding off of them just enough to keep others interested....

Chicagoans is a first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. This week’s Chicagoan is Charles Berg, 74, philatelist and owner of Stamp King (7139 W. Higgins, 773-775-2100). “I was sitting here one afternoon, and a couple comes in with a cover [a used envelope bearing canceled postage], and they want to know if it has any value. It’s a large-size cover, with a 10- and a 12-cent stamp from the 1870s....

QI’m a straight 18-year-old girl in my first sexual relationship. Things are a little awkward, and I could chalk it up to inexperience, but here’s what I feel conflicted about: I have a vore fetish. It was a fascination for me as a young child and became a sexual thing around the time I hit puberty. I’m wondering now whether this is something I need to get off. It works well when I’m on my own, but I always thought “regular stuff” would work too once I was actually getting some....

Time to plan the first official week of summer. Here’s some of what we recommend:

Alex Wong/Getty Images Does Bernie Sanders have conservative skeletons in his closet? Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. • Or see dashboard camera video of a Chicago police officer shooting “into a moving car of six unarmed teenagers” in December 2013? —John Dunlevy • That President Obama will appear on an episode of WTF With Marc Maron? —Drew Hunt

In more ways than one, Fifty Shades of Grey asks us to bow to our masters. Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. • About Fifty Shades of Grey‘s procapitalist subtext? —Drew Hunt

Friends and family held a “March for Matt” and a candlelight vigil Tuesday for Matthew Williams, a 21-year-old Chicago activist who was shot and killed Friday night. Williams was playing Xbox with friends in a basement apartment in the city’s Park Manor neighborhood when a gunman fired into the window of the apartment, striking Williams in the back. His cousin cradled him in his arms until an ambulance arrived, according to several of Williams’s friends....

After seven years of interpolating holiday favorites and classic material by free-jazz icon Albert Ayler—including the saxophonist’s screaming gospel fervor—in his annual December concert in Chicago, reedist Mars Williams is expanding the concept in 2017. To support Mars Williams Presents: An Ayler Xmas (Soul What), a raucous new release recorded last year at the Hungry Brain, he’s organized a tour around the U.S. and Europe this month. The performances will feature a revolving cast of players from each locale, but as the new CD makes clear, it will be hard to top the rapport he has with his Chicago compatriots—the personnel of his long-running Ayler tribute band Witches & Devils, who not only know Williams’s improvisational ethos intimately but have helped him develop this wonderful hybrid....

There’s a striking irony to the fact that City Hall is nonagenarian documentarian Frederick Wiseman’s 45th feature. It was shot amid the Trump presidency in 2018 and 2019 and is being released in the days leading up to and after an election that will hopefully result in the infantile authoritarian’s ousting. But Wiseman, who made his first documentary, Titicut Follies, in 1967, never makes films in response to the current political climate—at least, not explicitly....

Roland Godefroy RIP B.B. King Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. • That yesterday a total of zero legislators voted in favor of making Illinois a right-to-work state? —Mick Dumke

Greg Skidmore Rick Santorum is running for president, because of course he is. Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. • About the benefits and limitations of the game theory of John Nash, the celebrated mathematician who died in a car crash over the weekend? —Steve Bogira • About what the state of your inbox says about you? —Brianna Wellen

Lynda Barry’s landmark comic strip Ernie Pook’s Comeek appeared in 70 papers nationwide (including this one) during its nearly three-decade run, which started sometime in the late 70s and ended in 2008. The most beloved character to emerge from that title was spunky Marlys Mullen, a freckled, bespectacled eight-year-old with pigtails pointing in opposite directions. Loosely based on Barry‘s own childhood years, Marlys lives in a trailer park with her teenage sister Maybonne, her younger brother Freddie, and her cousins Arna and Arnold....

Local hip-hop group He Who Walks Three Ways played a big role in developing the Chicago scene in the early 90s. In 1992, cofounder Duro Wicks launched a short-lived but crucial hip-hop weekly at Lower Links, which put a spotlight on HWWTW—they were big enough to open for the likes of the Pharcyde, Arrested Development, and A Tribe Called Quest. (Lori Branch, the DJ for the four-person outfit, had already secured her own legendary status when she became the first female house DJ....

For the last few years, Republicans have puffed themselves up as defenders of free speech and opponents of cancel culture. That is—they reserved the right to cancel your culture while defending their right to say whatever they want. In 2019, Dr. Lee opined in a tweet that Trump and Dershowitz had a “shared psychosis” of “grandiosity and delusional-level impunity.” But you know how it goes. When you’re, say, a gay student protesting homophobia, you’re a snowflake....

Never have I ever objected to anything my esteemed colleague Ben Joravsky has written. Up until two weeks ago he’s been the perfect embodiment of soulful wit and journalistic pugnaciousness—always punching up, never down. Mushrooms are merely the visible fruits of vast unseen mycelial networks; threadlike structures that protect and connect the roots of plants, with the ability to warn the other growing things in the forest of impending disease and pestilence....

Who’s going to notice a breakfast biscuit next to a display case filled with Fruity Pebbles doughnuts, Snickers old-fashioned, and red velvet glazed with cream cheese frosting? Doughnut production relocated to the new, larger location earlier this summer, and though they can stand up to any in the city’s doughnut establishment—whether textured old-fashioneds encrusted with alien green pistachio, overinflated strawberry glazed, or Valrhona chocolate-iced cake doughnuts—they all do the job they were made for....

The wet-seat surprise is a common fear among Chicago transit riders. For decades the seats on CTA trains and buses have been covered with dark cloth fabric panels that, while adding nominal comfort, have the unfortunate ability to mask the presence of spilled coffee, not to mention urine or other bodily fluids. Seasoned passengers know well to perform a “seat check,” gingerly touching the fabric to test for moisture, before resting their backsides....

Chicagoans is a first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. This week’s Chicagoan is Jerry Pazin, 45, history teacher and Seinfeld Club adviser, Saint Rita of Cascia High School. Now we usually get anywhere between six to ten kids. If I advertise that we’ll have pizza, we get one or two more. We meet about every other week. Usually at the start of the year, I’ll show the pilot episode, just so they can see the show evolve....