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Robert Mora/Getty Images True gray I just spotted an essay that brought back memories—memories of a moment in my long-lost youth that I hadn’t thought about in roughly two days. Mr. President! For God’s sake, and America’s sake, quit so often calling crimes that involve a black person “racist”! As the president who came to office, a black man promising to bring people together, a man ideally suited for that job since you were born both black and white, you had a God-given chance to actually proclaim and demonstrate that racial divides and prejudice had greatly diminished and that our society was truly becoming colorblind....

Outstanding Chicago psych-pop group Roommate have made barely a peep since playing a June 2015 residency at the Hideout and releasing the album Make Like that month. But main dude Kent Lambert has resuscitated the project, dropping the single “Kepler-452B” on Bandcamp last week—and in a departure from the full-band sessions for Make Like, he recorded it alone (with some mixing by Nick Broste). “I’ve been playing guitar for the last couple of years for the first time since high school, and I went a little crazy with pedals and overdubs,” he says....

UPDATE Monday, March 16: this event has been canceled. Refunds available at point of purchase. Ruby (Brooke Reams) and Wilson (Kevin Tre’Von Patterson) seem to have a picture-book marriage. While their daughter is away at summer camp, they plan on trying for another baby. But when Ruby’s best friend, Claire (Deveon Bromby), comes to stay a few weeks while recovering from the loss of a husband shot by a white cop, the couple’s seemingly blissful existence is shattered....

ARTIST: Eric Rot SHOW: Terrorizer, Cardiac Arrest, Acid Witch, and Sick/Tired at Cobra Lounge on Sat 10/29 MORE ONLINE: rotgrafix.blogspot.com

Improvisers Shelby Plummer and Brad Pike spend their time onstage creating worlds and characters, but their earlier work started on the page. Both studied creative writing in college and participated in the local live-lit community. With Fictitious, an online literary journal and live improv performance at iO, they marry fiction writing and comedy. “We found that most of our comedy friends also have some sort of a creative writing background,” Plummer says....

Like most Mexican American women, I grew up idolizing Selena Quintanilla-Perez, always singing along and dancing around my grandparents’ house to her music—to this day, you can still catch me in my kitchen doing the “washing machine” while singing along to “La Carcacha” and reveling in the power that was Selena’s voice. It’s because of this that I often feel so protective of her and the way her story gets told....

For five straight summers, DJ, producer, and rapper Fess Grandiose helped put on Kimball House Rock, a daylong DIY hip-hop festival he hosted in the backyard of his Logan Square home. Though Grandiose, 30, was raised in south-suburban Hazel Crest, he’s completely embraced his new neighborhood: the final Kimball House Rock, held in 2014, offered a snapshot of the alternative-rap acts operating on the northwest side. The bill included rappers Angel Katz, Auggie the 9th, and Rich Jones; DJ Sev Seveer of beat-scene collective Push Beats; nomadic multi-instrumentalist Netherfriends; and now-defunct hip-hop group Hurt Everybody....

ARTIST: Liz Born SHOWS: The Picnics on the Porch series at the Hideout MORE INFO: hoofprintchicago.com

The Chicago Reader was nominated for several Peter Lisagor Awards from the Chicago Headline Club Thursday night. Police in Chicago Public Schools operate with no special training and little oversight, by @city_bureau @Chicago_Reader @Yanazure https://t.co/xbCsVvpFvR — BGA (@BetterGov) April 12, 2018 Drum roll please! Here are all the @Chicago_Reader stories nominated for @headlineclub #Lisagor awards this year! First up, for @rejburns‘s masterful investigation on contract-for-deed home sales (edited by @rsamer): https://t....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Tuesday, December 27, 2016. We hope you had a wonderful long holiday weekend! Former “harbor boss” tells stories of lakefront-related corruption Robert Nelson, the city’s final director of Harbors and Marine Services between 1987 and 1993, has written a book called Dirty Waters (reviewed by the Reader here) about the experience. Nelson, now 76, was appointed by Mayor Harold Washington. The four men who held the “harbor boss” job before him all ended up in federal prison....

The title of Jason Diamond’s new memoir, Searching for John Hughes: Or Everything I Thought I Needed to Know About Life I Learned From Watching 80s Movies, is deceptive—it suggests a series of cheerful reminiscences about lessons Diamond learned from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and The Breakfast Club and how he applied them to his own life. But Searching for John Hughes is both darker and more interesting. Diamond grew up mostly on the North Shore, close to where Hughes lived and set his greatest sequence of films, from Sixteen Candles in 1984 through Home Alone in 1990....

“Polyester!” KeiyaA says, laughing. “The uniforms were so thick and dense.” We’re in what she calls the “studio room” of her Bushwick apartment, reminiscing about singing in the Chicago Children’s Choir. Hanging on the wall behind her is a white pegboard adorned with an assortment of audio cables. KeiyaA, 28, was in the choir till she was 12, but she tells me she doesn’t remember much besides the red vests of their performance uniforms and the dimly lit church (First Unitarian, on the corner of 56th and Woodlawn) where they rehearsed....

As much as I love the music of eras past, I’m pretty skeptical of band reunions—especially when the number of founding or classic-era members begins to dwindle. Case in point: 1970s cosmic rockers Captain Beyond are still touring, but drummer Bobby Caldwell is the only original member aboard. Caldwell played on the first and last of the band’s three proper LPs, leaving after their 1972 self-titled debut to join hard rocker Rick Derringer (of “Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo” fame) on 1973’s All American Boy and then returning to Captain Beyond for the disappointing 1977 LP Dawn Explosion....

Ask a local movie theater general manager about the last four months, and you’ll get a sigh. A portion of local theaters were known as much for screening independent movies (Cold War, Uncut Gems), classics (Lawrence of Arabia in 70mm, Goodfellas), and midnight movies (Mandy, The Room) as they were for blockbusters. However, Davis, Logan, and the New 400 are waiting for blockbuster titles like Christopher Nolan’s Tenet and Disney’s live-action remake of Mulan....

Last year the New York-based pianist Mara Rosenbloom took a bold step forward with her third album, Prairie Burn (Fresh Sound New Talent), an incisive outing named for the practice of using controlled fires to encourage the natural preservation and renewal of indigenous growth. Rosenbloom, who grew up near Madison, Wisconsin, thought of the process while rethinking her work following lessons from jazz pianist Connie Crothers. As she told me during an interview earlier this year, “I was sort of looking to make something that could be like that: Can we just set loose this energy and sort of let go of everything?...

The interruptions at Thursday’s aldermanic town hall meeting on the overhaul of the Independent Police Review Authority (IPRA) began immediately. The Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression gathered nearly 40,000 signatures in support of the idea over the last three years. For a full minute, a representative from the group led the room in a chant of “Sixteen shots and a cover up”—a reference to the fatal shooting of Laquan McDonald in October 2014....

Is it the water in Lake Michigan that makes Chicago such a politically corrupt city? That might sound like an outlandish theory, but R.J. Nelson’s Dirty Waters: Confessions of Chicago’s Last Harbor Boss makes a compelling case. What also keeps things lively is the tone of Nelson’s writing, a chili bowl full of corner-tap talk, sensitive memoir, and detective fiction. At times the gumshoe similes soar: “New furniture and carpeting were ordered, but like reform in government the process took time while the stench of chain-smoked corruption lingered....

Al Podgorski / Chicago Sun-Times Cook County Board president Toni Preckwinkle (left) says state’s attorney Anita Alvarez (right) has a “narrow” and “punitive” approach to justice. Not so long ago politicians were afraid of appearing soft on crime, and in many places they still are. But the landscape is shifting rapidly—to the point that everyone who wants to be Cook County’s top prosecutor is promising to keep more people out of jail....