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Mike Sula Pajun pancake, Bryn Mawr Breakfast Club Mike Sula Bryn Mawr Breakfast Club

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Friday, September 2, 2016. Have a great Labor Day weekend! Gang members speak out: “Some people don’t got a father and they are looking to be loved” Five convicted felons spoke out publicly Wednesday about why people join gangs, sell drugs, and more at Keepin It Real, an event organized by the Near West Police District and the nonprofit Safer Foundation. Asked what residents should do if they see gang activity, one of the men advised steering clear and not trying to interfere....

Gerard Julien A demonstrator in Madrid, Spain. Here is a passage I wish I could believe. It showed up in Steve Chapman’s Tribune column, “Religious violence and the road to civilization.” What most Westerners long ago realized is something Muslim extremists have not: In the battle of ideas, reason is the only weapon. For any cause to resort to murder and persecution against those who disagree is an admission of failure....

Ah, the roller rink—a community center where everyone keeps moving in circles, forever, to retro pop songs, in colored slacks and bowl cuts. There is no time there. There is no world beyond its borders. There’s only the supremely charming Lucky Plush ensemble, sliding their bare and socked feet over the Marley flooring in Steppenwolf’s black-box theater. Rink Life, devised by director Julia Rhoads in collaboration with the ensemble, brings life to this insular society, where everyone mostly gets along most of the time....

John Corbett describes the artwork on display at “Monster Roster: Existentialist Art in Postwar Chicago”—an exhibit he cocurated that opens this weekend at the Smart Museum—as “a howling, terrified, introspective whorl of penetrating angst and disoriented subjectivity.” Elsewhere in his essay Corbett proposes Thelonious Monk’s “Ugly Beauty” as the theme music for the show, and that song title is as apt a description as it gets. Most of the members of the Monster Roster studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and were profoundly influenced by Kathleen Blackshear, who told them to go to the Field Museum and draw Oceanic and Native American artifacts....

It’s impossible not to think of Muhammad Ali when viewing O.J.: Made in America, filmmaker Ezra Edelman’s absorbing five-part, seven-and-a-half-hour documentary about the rise and fall of O.J. Simpson for ESPN’s venerable 30 for 30 series. When Muhammad Ali died on June 3 at the age of 74, the world didn’t just mourn the loss of a gifted athlete, it also lamented the loss of a fiery political figure. He was someone who spoke truth to power, who through his actions declared that “Black Lives Matter,” who refused to let the world forget that he was both black and Muslim, no matter what the cost....

Whether you want to feel the love or not this weekend, there’s plenty of recommended things to do. Fri 2/14: Odd Pleasures: A Queer Valentine’s Day Event features a queer variety show hosted by Aunty Chan that includes live ASMR, drag, comedy, and short films. 6-9 PM, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 220 E. Chicago, mcachicago.org, $10, $8 students. Sat 2/15: The Half-Court Classic 3v3 Invitational is a celebration of basketball culture with a three on three tournament and complimentary food and beverages, hosted by Kyle O’Quinn and organized by Lululemon Chicago and Mob Rep with Cool Kids, Femdot, Qari, DJ Evie the Cool, DJ Cash Era, DJ Selah Say....

Here’s good news for Chicago journalists and journalism. ProPublica is hiring. The New York-based investigative outlet is interviewing for an editor here in Chicago. And once that editor is found—by early January, says ProPublica—he or she will take the lead in hiring an editorial staff of ten or so additional journalists. The Ford Foundation gave ProPublica a grant to extend its operations beyond New York, and Chicago will be the first outpost....

Where are some Chicago places that you go when you just need to get out of the house and get a change of scenery? When things are falling apart it’s hard not to rush to judgement and anger, or turn off and wallow in sadness. In tough times it’s more important than ever to make sure that we’re taking care of ourselves and centering our emotions in a place of calm and compassion, so that we can then go out and do the good work that our families and communities need us to....

Last weekend was an auspicious one for Chicago Opera Theater. On Friday, at DePaul University’s handsome Gannon Concert Hall, COT presented The Life and Death(s) of Alan Turing, an opera in progress by composer Justine F. Chen and librettist David Simpatico. This one-night concert performance was the culmination of a weeklong workshop, and there’s no doubt some fine-tuning to come (the second act needs trimming), but it was a revelatory evening, worthy of the man who invented the modern computer and facilitated the Allied victory in World War II by breaking the German military’s secret code—only to be prosecuted and chemically castrated by British authorities for homosexual activity, which was then illegal and heavily policed....

Few contemporary indie-rock bands deliver as consistently as Boston’s Pile. Roughly every other year since 2007, they’ve dropped a collection of pummeling, direct songs executed with posthardcore aggression and postrock grandeur, their lyrics carrying a twinge of subversive indignation. Their seventh studio album, May’s Green and Gray (Exploding in Sound), arrives following a time of transition. Guitarist Matt Becker and bassist Matt Connery left the band after 2017’s A Hairshirt of Purpose, and front man Rick Maguire moved to Nashville, where he was joined by two new members, former touring guitarist Chappy Hull and bassist Alex Molini....

The downsides of ride-hailing services like Lyft and Uber are well-documented. Studies show that in addition to decimating the taxi industry, they’ve increased traffic congestion and cannibalized transit use. The City Council was wise when it voted last November to pass a new fee on ride-hailing trips, with the additional money going to fund CTA infrastructure. Old-school car share can be handy for stocking up on groceries or picking up furniture from Craigslist, or as a convenient way to rent a vehicle for a day trip....

In fall 1999, NYU freshman Tim Sweeney launched a late-night dance show called Beats in Space on the college’s radio station. The show attracted fans from throughout the city’s dance community, and Sweeney became enmeshed in the scene, interning for DFA and occasionally DJing the city’s infamously wild Motherfucker party. He still hosts Beats in Space on WNYU today, and since 2011 he’s run a label with the same name. In February the Beats in Space label ushered in its new mix series with Powder in Space by Japanese DJ Momoko Goto, who produces and performs as Powder....

Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago. Invited to host Soho House’s Route 66-themed New Year’s Eve party, Shea Couleé showed up with a look she describes as “1950s Cadillac meets the streets meets cotton-candy confection.” Channeling a Vogue fashion editorial featuring model Karlie Kloss at the graffiti-covered Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo, Texas, she worked with Chicago designer Randall Hill to create the pink neoprene dress....

Early in my tenure at this paper, a coworker told me, “Reader readers are seldom breeders.” Like the opening words of a nursery rhyme, this dictum has stuck with me over the years, and it partly explains why we devote so little of our resources to reviewing children’s films. With adult-minded movies ever harder to find in theaters, surely movies for kids can take care of themselves, driven as they are by epic marketing campaigns and the awesome peer pressure of schoolyard buzz....

“I lost my song. I lost it because I didn’t know what it was worth,” laments a young bluesman freshly returned to Memphis from an abortive attempt at making it in Chicago. Ace of Spades (Matthew James Elam) is speaking literally—like many Black songwriter-musicians before and after him, he got scammed out of the rights for a song—but the line has metaphorical heft in Katori Hall’s 2007 play Hoodoo Love, now at Raven Theatre under Wardell Julius Clark’s warm direction....

When I asked my girlfriend recently to pick up lemons for making cocktails and she brought me Meyer lemons, I was a little dismayed at first. The Meyer lemon, a cross between a lemon and a mandarin orange, is sweeter, less acidic, and more aromatic than its conventional cousin (most lemons sold in supermarkets are Eureka or Lisbon lemons). I wasn’t sure how it would work in the cocktails I was planning to make....

Last year, Gossip Wolf was stoked to report that one-man electro army Jim Magas was launching a label called Midwich—and this week the Bleader premieres tracks from new Midwich releases by Hide and Alex Barnett! Reader music editor Philip Montoro compares Hide’s “muscular, minimalist tracks” to “something you’d hear at a gas-powered vampire disco in a Mad Max movie”—check out the local industrial duo’s Flesh for the Living 12-inch and tell us they don’t run Barter­town!...

Dee Rees’s period drama Mudbound, which is now available to watch on Netflix, opens with a scene that sets the tone for everything that follows. In the Mississippi Delta during the mid-1940s, two white brothers struggle to dig a plot on the family farm where they can bury their father’s corpse. Excavating the earth, they uncover the skull of someone who’d been buried in this location some time before. The skeleton belongs to a former slave, one of the brothers declares, because it contains a bullet hole in the skull—the person must have been shot while trying to run away....