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What exactly does Michael Ferro want out of the news industry? It’s a fair question for the man who controls the country’s third-largest newspaper publishing company, including the vast majority of publications covering the Chicago area. During his turbulent five years at Wrapports, Ferro approved the creation of Grid, an ambitious business publication that was unfortunately compromised by puff pieces about Ferro’s friends. Ferro’s strained relationship with the Sun-Times reached its nadir in 2014, when the paper’s highly respected Springfield bureau chief, Dave McKinney, resigned after management threatened to reassign him because a story he wrote stuck in the craw of then-gubernatorial candidate Bruce Rauner, Ferro’s pal and a former Wrapports investor....

At the heart of It Follows, a low-budget horror film by David Robert Mitchell, lies a tantalizing open-ended metaphor—a deadly curse passed from one person to another through sexual intercourse. Once cursed, the victim is pursued by a creeping, shape-shifting demon that kills anyone it touches; the demon moves so slowly, however, that you can easily avoid it if you keep moving. Nonetheless, the cursed must remain vigilant because the demon can blend into any environment and almost always takes the form of an ordinary-looking person....

Cello and electronics player Fred Lonberg-Holm, who lived in Chicago until 2017, and Norwegian drummer Ståle Liavik Solberg are the Party Knüllers. The name of the duo is a bit deceptive; their freewheeling approach to improvising is more like a friendly (but not too friendly) game of street ball than Andrew W.K.-style headbanging. But they do adhere to one rule of partying—no matter how much fun you’re having making music, it’s even more fun when the right friends join in....

Lincoln Square artist Lothar Speer recalled the time in 1991 he was called to O’Hare Airport to pick up a shipment of Keim paint. He’d ordered it directly from its German manufacturer for an outdoor mural he planned to create. Keim is an expensive, mineral silicate paint whose colors bind tightly to surfaces and can last decades, so Speer was horrified to see a customs inspector don rubber gloves and reach into the buckets to check for contraband, precious liquid pigment dripping from his arms....

For much of the last half century, the paranoia and tyranny of the McCarthy era in America has seemed more like a bizarre anomaly than an evil that could easily reappear. And that story is an old one: virgin meets cad. Timothy Laughlin (tenor Jonas Hacker) is a recent college graduate—an endearingly dorky, devotedly Catholic intern at a D.C. newspaper seeking a future in public policy. A chance meeting with Hawkins Fuller (baritone Joseph Lattanzi)— a dashing Harvard graduate, state department careerist, and serial seducer—lands him a job on a senator’s staff and introduces him to the exhilaration and heartbreak of first love....

Gannett upped the ante Monday, letting Tribune Publishing shareholders know it would now pay $15 a share to take over the company. The original offer was $12.25, and the value of the stock when Gannett made it in April was about $7.50. Gannett’s behaving like an army laying siege, dropping leaflets onto the rabble within that say, We come to free you. Rise up and open the gates. It’s tempting to think that when one destiny is weighed against the other, control of the Chicago Tribune by the Gannett chain instead of Ferro doesn’t look so bad....

Thinkstock No matter how little space you give some writers, they try to fill it with a world. Frank Stewart is one of these writers; marketed as a bridge columnist and allotted about 160 words a day, he presides over a cast of characters who preen, smolder, blunder, lick their wounds, and occasionally make the kind of off-tune remark that lands Stewart in trouble with the front office. “Pat vetoed that one,” Stewart told me—speaking of Patrick Fitzmaurice, his editor at the Tribune Content Agency, which syndicates him....

COVID-19 has struck Illinois in force just as the spring gardening season is starting. If you’re a gardener in Chicago, you’ve probably already ordered and started germinating your seeds, plotted your now-dormant backyard or balcony plot (or pots), and made a wish list of seedlings you’d like to buy from garden centers and the various community plant sales scheduled to begin in May (see below). I talked with a pair of gardening experts about why home and community gardening is more important now than ever, and what they had to say is encouraging....

The Nashville-born, Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter Sunny War is known for her clawhammer fingerstyle guitar playing, vivid autobiographical lyrics, and distinctive sound that starts at the crossroads of blues, country, folk, and punk, and only expands from there. She left home as a teenager to busk on Venice Beach and in San Francisco with friends she met in local punk scenes, and since then she’s battled homelessness, substance abuse, and domestic violence....

Hedwig and the Angry Inch Each Friday, we recommend seven Old Movies to Watch Now, all of which come recommended by one of our critics and can currently be screened online. Read the review, watch the movie, feel accomplished. • Ira and Abby, Robert Cary’s neoscrewball comedy.

Nicknames are good for tavern regulars and old-time gangsters. For anyone and anything else they can be downright cringeworthy. Alas, Chicago is an eminently nickname-able city. Maybe it’s because the world associates Chicago with taverns and old-time gangsters, or maybe it’s just our lousy luck that city nicknames accumulate like dibs chairs in January. Sure, they add color to the landscape of our midwestern vernacular, but for every cool Chicago epithet there are at least two or three awkward ones: for every Scarface, a Willie Potatoes....

It’s time to gear up for the last weekend of July. Here’s some of what we recommend: Fri 7/29-Sat 7/30: Head north to Highland Park for Titanic Live, a multimedia concert at the Ravinia Festival (200 Ravinia Park). The classic 1997 drama Titanic screens alongside a live score by Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Children’s Choir, and vocalist Clara Sanabras. 7 PM Sat 7/30-Sun 7/31: Lemons, limes, and tequila take over the South Shore Cultural Center (7059 S....

Curious Theatre Branch presents the world premiere of Matt Rieger’s overloaded whodunit about underworld struggles with a lot of hand-wringing over morality. When a neighborhood kid is mugged while running an errand for a mysterious figure named Hart (Rieger), it sets off a series of killings and reprisals that upends the power dynamic of the town. Told in four acts through a breathlessly listed series of dozens of scenes—none much longer than five minutes—this is an intermittently amusing but often baffling stew of snark and philosophizing masquerading as a mystery....

Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. • About whether the Oregon standoff is really evidence of a racial double standard? —Steve Bogira • That the Coachella lineup is out? (It includes the Black Madonna, who recently appeared in the Reader‘s People Issue.) —Leor Galil • About The Defender, Ethan Michaeli’s new history of the Chicago Defender—a “towering achievement,” according to this New York Times review? —Steve Bogira

The blue lady? Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. • That Chicago police stop and frisk citizens at even higher rates than cops in NYC? —Mick Dumke

What are you drinking to this week? I’ve done all of this bittersweet imbibing with cans of Don’t Stop the Presses, a bittersweet lager brewed by Haymarket Beer Co. A free and independent press! To all my friends!

New York-based Alexandra Drewchin, also known as Eartheater, creates mellow music that terrifies and/or terrifying music that you can sink back and relax to. On her most recent album, last year’s IRISIRI (Pan), she mixes elements of acoustic folk and electronica; the music pulses and flows like a heavy mist that dissipates only to show glimpses of waving heather and witches’ claws. But Drewchin never settles on one mood or mode, even within a single song....

Tony Smith Planting and Maintaining a Perennial Garden by Faheem Majeed at the Hyde Park Art Center, 2012 When curator Steven Bridges invited Faheem Majeed to do a show at the Museum of Contemporary Art, he was most interested in Majeed’s work as an artist. Majeed, who lives in South Shore, takes photos and creates installations that both record the changes in his neighborhood and reflect on his role as an artist living in that neighborhood....

As an artist, teacher, and musician, Rodney James Baker shaped countless lives, but he did it under the radar: throughout his career he remained fiercely independent, pursuing an idiosyncratic aesthetic that ensured he’d never reach a position of mainstream influence. He recorded his own tracks under the name Rodney Bakerr, but his most widely heard works were probably the house-music rhythm patterns he wrote in 1987 for the Roland Corporation, whose drum machines and synthesizers formed the bedrock of the Chicago sound at the time....

Next week local trio Basement Family welcome their first proper release (that is, their first that isn’t a demo tape). Their self-titled 12-inch EP comes out via the Maximum Pelt label, and today the Reader premieres an exclusive stream of it. Basement Family came together in 2014, after the demise of Bigcolour, the dreamy garage band of singer-guitarist Alex Auby and drummer Jeremy Lindemulder. They’ve since added bassist Joel Schafer and turned up the volume, blasting through a hybrid of stoner pop and garage rock as a blown-out, distortion-drenched power trio....