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Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Wednesday, October 19, 2016. Viral video shows man shooting at a car before he realizes his friend is inside Surveillance video of a man shooting at a passing car in Pilsen Saturday and then realizing that he was shooting at his friend’s car has gone viral, with nearly 100,000 views on YouTube. Upon realizing his mistake, he’s heard saying, “Aw man, my bad, dawg!...

In my review of Asako I & II that appears in this week’s Reader, I argue that the melodrama remains a genre with much to teach us. The heightened emotions we associate with melodramas speak to the feelings we all experience during moments of crisis and epiphany, while the blatant narrative contrivances of the genre can make us more cognizant of the arbitrary forces that shape our lives. The melodramatic tradition goes back hundreds of years, having a long legacy on stage before the movies began; the early cinema teems with melodramas, many of them adapted from popular stage plays....

The subject of this week’s film essay in the Reader, James Gray’s Ad Astra, imagines a future in which humanity has united in the mission to find and make contact with intelligent life outside our solar system. I won’t reveal whether the film’s characters succeed in their quest, though I’ll note that Ad Astra is a distinctive sci-fi picture in that it focuses on the hard science of how space travel and interstellar communication might work in the future as opposed to the science fantasy of how extraterrestrial life might look and behave....

When previously comparing the siege of Tribune Publishing to a corporate Game of Thrones, I overlooked an important player—the third column already inside the gates. That would be Oaktree Capital Management, the second largest shareholder after chairman Michael Ferro. Like most firms in its line of work, Oaktree has little tolerance for visionaries like Ferro, especially ones with little to point to in the way of successful visions. Oaktree sides with Gannett in its struggle to buy enough Tribune Publishing stock to take over the company, and on Monday it sent Tribune directors a letter that couldn’t have been clearer: Oaktree clearly has no faith in Ferro, and I don’t see anything in this letter that could be called a vote of confidence in whatever Gannett plans for Tribune Publishing....

This past Friday through Sunday, the fifth annual Ruido Fest brought several generations and even more genres of Latinx music together in Union Park. Not even Sunday’s rain could dampen the enthusiasm of the crowd that turned out for closing headliners Los Tigres del Norte, the most popular norteño band of all time. Photographer Rick Majewski went to Ruido Fest on Friday and came home with pictures of almost everybody on the bill....

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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. This posthumous 1992 collection from Arhoolie Records includes “Worried Life Blues,” “County Jail Blues,” “Things Have Changed,” and “Chicago Breakdown.”

Since the advent of cinema, people have been drawn to the screen by the promise of intimacy: the facial close-up, an overwhelming experience for early movie audiences, allowed them far inside the personal space of a stranger. Mainstream movies tend to celebrate intimacy—that quiet moment with a child or lover that redeems the stress and strain of being an astronaut or a hostage negotiator. But intimacy can also be a terrible burden....

Japanese producer Ryu Yoshizawa has a rich career that includes making music for business conglomerates Square Enix and Lotte, spending 17 years and counting in sound artists’ group Office Intenzio, and providing live support for synth-pop pioneers Ryuichi Sakamoto and Yukihiro Takahashi. His output as Koeosaeme has been varied too. His 2017 debut under that alias, Sonorant, features confetti-blasted footwork abstractions; 2018’s Float is all brooding drones and minimal electronics; and 2019’s Obanikeshi embraces full-blown sound-collage frenzy, with kaleidoscopic productions that often move at breakneck speeds....

In Book Swap, a Reader staffer recommends between two and five books and then asks a local wordsmith, literary enthusiast, or expert to do the same. In this installment, Reader deputy editor Kate Schmidt swaps book suggestions with Karen Yates, producer and host of Super Tasty, a monthly cabaret-talk show about sex, the second season of which opens Friday, March 15, at Constellation. Karen Yates, producer-host Super Tasty Fri 3/15, 8 PM, Constellation, 3111 N....

For the past few days, I’ve been barraged with calls and e-mails from friends of the progressive persuasion, extolling the virtues of Lori Lightfoot or Toni Preckwinkle. Look, I understand we’ve entered the frenzied final moments of a campaign, where folks are losing their collective minds with the urge to glorify the home team and demonize the opposition. And I know that if you can’t convince the voters of your candidate’s virtues, the next best thing is to scare them with a distorted caricature of your opponent....

Beach Bunny singer, guitarist, and songwriter Lili Trifilio established herself as a surrogate older sister to a generation of listeners when the band’s single “Prom Queen” went viral on TikTok in 2019. The Chicago four-piece are more than a “TikTok band,” though. Sure, the teens who dominate the popular video-sharing platform connected with Trifilio’s concise melodies and with the feminist themes of “Prom Queen” (it indicts the unrealistic beauty standards applied to young women), but by then Beach Bunny had already come up through the city’s DIY rock scene—they’d earned their bona fides by playing years of house shows and self-releasing a string of EPs....

Sound artists Oren Ambarchi and Crys Cole have both had thrilling careers. Ambarchi has run experimental label Black Truffle for more than a decade, and he’s collaborated with a wide array of avant-garde luminaries, including Sunn O))), Keiji Haino, and Keith Rowe and John Tilbury (both veterans of long-running UK improvising group AMM). Last year, the Australian musician released the resplendent solo LP Simian Angel (on Austrian label Editions Mego) right in the middle of summer, which felt like perfect timing: its two long-form pieces invoke hot, humid weather....

Last month New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art celebrated brilliant and singular pianist Cecil Taylor with a series of performances, film and video screenings, listening sessions, and poetry readings, plus an exhibition of “archival videos, audio, notational scores, photographs, poetry, and other ephemera,” all under the name Open Plan: Cecil Taylor. The whole thing was bookended by rare performances from Taylor himself. The pianist has worked with loads of fantastic musician throughout his long career—many of whom participated in the exhibition, including bassist William Parker, drummers Tony Oxley and Andrew Cyrille, and cellist Tristan Honsinger—but few players have inhabited Taylor’s aesthetic and work with the devotion, clarity, and commitment of Jimmy Lyons, a powerful alto saxophonist who performed with Taylor between 1961 and his own death in 1986....

For about a year, Democrats have been calling for a “Fair Tax” that would raise more money for our dead-broke state and schools by soaking the rich. Instead, we’ll make do with hearings on a nonbinding, largely symbolic resolution that castigates our current system as unfair without actually doing anything about it. That’s what progressive Democrats have been proposing for the better part of a year. In fact, the Republicans introduced HR 975, their own nonbinding referendum, resolving to stand “united in opposition to any measure that would allow the creation of a graduated income tax” in Illinois....

Since 1999, British producer Bonobo (aka Simon Green) has been perfecting a serene downtempo electronic sound with porous borders. His most recent album, 2017’s Migration (Ninja Tune), features contributions from precious R&B band Rhye, Nicole Miglis of moody art-rockers Hundred Waters, and New York-based group Innov Gnawa, Moroccan natives whose hypnotic music is rooted in centuries-old Gnawa traditions. Migration features a track titled “Outlier,” and Bonobo has also adopted that name for his occasional program on Internet radio station NTS, for his Spotify playlist, and for his concert series....

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group Does this look like chick lit to you? The war between Jennifer Weiner and Jonathan Franzen has been going on for nearly four and a half years, since the fall of 2010 when Franzen’s most recent novel, Freedom, was published, and hostilities show no sign of abating, largely because of Weiner’s immense capacity for taking offense and Franzen’s equally large capacity for giving it. (This is, remember, the man who became famous by asking Oprah if he had to take part in her book club....

Courtesy of “Weird Al” Yankovic’s Facebook page “Weird Al” Yankovic “Weird Al” Yankovic has been part of my pop-music vernacular since before I knew pop music had its own language. Yankovic’s irreverent, good-natured spoofs of hit singles felt both silly and subversive to me. I didn’t fully understand the originals before Yankovic interpreted them, and though I probably didn’t get every joke he threw in certain tracks till years later, his fun-house-mirror version of pop made sense to me as a child—and felt like something I could claim as my own....

Lake Michigan is the crown jewel of this fair city. Unfortunately, as swim advisories occasionally remind beachgoers, it’s also full of shit. If the flag is yellow, you’re a fellow . . . who likes to gamble with his health.

Even after a weeklong intubation in an ICU unit and months of recovery, Maria Cabrera still didn’t know how she became infected with COVID-19. But here in Indiana’s biggest COVID-19 hotspot, Latinos make up just 17 percent of the population, but accounted for up to half of positive cases in the early months of the pandemic, according to Goshen Health Hospital. When Indiana reopened in early May, thousands of Latino immigrants like Cabrera, many of them undocumented, returned to physically demanding work—building RV frames, wiring units, manufacturing parts, and sewing furniture—in packed factories where social distancing can be difficult....