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A turbulent year ended for principal Mary Beth Cunat when, two weeks before the last day of class, she announced her resignation from Wildwood Elementary School on the far northwest side. She made the decision in the wake of parent outrage—and even threats—after she brought an anti-police speaker to the school. The most proximal cause of Cunat’s resignation was a controversy that erupted at the end of May, after she’d invited police abolitionist and community organizer Ethan “Ethos” Viets-VanLear to speak to sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-graders for career day....

In 1964, when his one-act Dutchman premiered off-Broadway at the Cherry Lane Theatre, Amiri Baraka was still LeRoi Jones—a 30-year-old black poet with a BA in English, a dishonorable discharge from the U.S. Air Force (for possessing Soviet propaganda), and a complicated interracial love life. You might also say he was full of rage, but that would be an awfully polite way of putting it. At least as he expressed himself in the play, he was an antiwhite, misogynist bigot....

Thunder Road The summer movie season officially starts this weekend with the release of Furious 7, the latest installment in the remarkably durable action franchise that’s drawn think pieces and hot takes galore. The series is a Hollywood staple, a bloated and bombastic moneymaking machine that shows no signs of slowing down, but its roots are found in cheapo B-pictures. The 2001 film that started this whole thing borrows its title from the Roger Corman-produced 1955 cheapie The Fast and the Furious, one of the many automotive adventures that make up the surprisingly diverse car genre, whose varied canon is shaped by exploitation absurdity, art film sophistication, and everything in between....

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. Older strips are archived here.

To cheer you up during this pandemic, I’ve pored over last week’s election results, looking for the good news. I know it’s not nice to gloat. But this is a gloatable moment. On top of everything else, Burke was Donald Trump’s property tax lawyer. He made you pay more in property taxes by using his clout to get Trump to pay less on his tower. So, c’mon, Chicago. Let’s all gloat together....

The history of house music would be incomplete without southeast-side native Steve “Silk” Hurley. After landing a regular DJ gig at south-side house hot spot Sauer’s in the early 80s, he was inspired to make his own tracks, and the work he produced throughout the rest of that decade played a critical role in informing the world about house. As one half of J.M. Silk he created the “Music Is the Key” 12-inch, which in 1985 became the first release from DJ International, the local outfit that would become an influential house label; with 1986’s “Jack Your Body” he popularized “jack,” one of the genre’s definitive terms, and introduced Chicago house to the UK, where the song hit number one on the British dance charts; he also released some of the first major-label house hits through RCA....

In its 15th and final installment, the fundamental problems with Collaboraction’s Sketchbook Festival are unmistakable: its scale and its irrelevance. Collaboraction artistic director Anthony Moseley admits to the latter, after a fashion, in his program note. What began a decade and a half ago as an experiment in “the convergence of theatre, music and visual art” has become to a large extent de rigueur on the theater fringe. “Multidisciplinary short play festivals are the new norm,” Moseley writes, and he’s dead-on....

William Basinski has thrown himself headlong into the kind of “productive quarantine” that seems like a myth to most of us, and the spoils are abundant. Since March, when states across the U.S. began issuing stay-at-home orders, he has unveiled a collaboration with sound artist Richard Chartier and a new project called Sparkle Division. The New York-based composer and musician is best known for the four-volume audio experiment The Disintegration Loops, which he created in summer 2001 by recording the deterioration of tape loops he’d made in the early 80s....

Sun-Times Media They’re back . . . and looking a lot older than they do here. Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. • About a Chinese billionaire who’s trying to build a canal through Nicaragua that will challenge the Panama Canal for the world’s cargo traffic? —Tal Rosenberg • That Jimmy Fallon hosted a Saved by the Bell reunion? —Cassidy Ryan

Update: This show has been canceled to help slow the spread of COVID-19. Tickets will be refunded at point of purchase. Damo Suzuki has always had a case of wanderlust. Born in 1950 in Kobe, Japan, he began traveling while still in his teens and spent time living in Gräsmark, Sweden, before eventually landing in Cologne, Germany, where he landed a gig as the lead singer of Krautrock progenitors Can in the early 70s....

Scroll through the first 20 of Soundcloud’s 50 most popular tracks right now, and you’ll find songs from three Chicagoland MCs: Juice Wrld, Polo G, and Calboy. The song in the top 20 with the most total plays is Calboy’s “Envy Me,” with more than 66 million since December. And those numbers are just for the version Calboy released after signing to RCA and Polo Grounds in fall 2018—the “Envy Me” video had been on YouTube since August, and now has more than 113 million plays there....

(Tall Pat) Bleach Party‘s Endless Bender EP doesn’t come out till Friday, but you may already have heard the serrated surf-rock guitars of the tightly wound, garage-inflected “Single Summer”—this bonus track from the EP’s digital version appeared in a national radio spot for the McDonald’s value menu that aired for a few weeks over the summer. The ad put “a little extra dough” in the band’s pockets, says bassist Richard Giraldi, but he’s much more excited about Endless Bender....

New Jersey singer-songwriter Donna Missal has a smoky, powerhouse voice, and a flair for making retro soul sound up-to-the-minute that recalls Amy Winehouse. She began releasing songs in 2015, and on her 2018 debut album, This Time (Harvest), she shows she has potential to become a household name. Opening track “Girl” starts with her vocals framed by a few muted chords and a stripped-down beat; it sounds so good you’re almost sorry when the rest of the band comes in....

Of all the albums I’ve covered since the Reader adapted to the pandemic by trading concert previews for record reviews, the new release from Finnish metal explorers Dark Buddha Rising is probably the best one I could’ve picked to help me stay grounded and focused during our agonizing election week. Psych, drone, and doom are among the most immersive forms of music on earth, and on Mathreyata, Dark Buddha Rising alchemize them into something that feels big enough to encompass the cosmos—an especially inviting place when things get this heavy on the home planet....

Santa Cruz hardcore outfit Gulch cover a lot of ground in the brief 16 minutes of their new Impenetrable Cerebral Fortress. The four-piece leave no punk or metal stone unturned; they cram every possible take on dark, heavy, and mean into the album’s eight tracks, which all grind to a halt just as quickly as they start. Impenetrable Cerebral Fortress is so wildly intense and varied it’s nearly impossible to do it justice in print....

It’s important for me as a progressive stereotype to listen to public radio while driving and to get outraged at the news. If my hackles are especially raised, I will even tweet about it. (Like I said, progressive stereotype.) This is what transpired in October after I heard a report from WBEZ’s Odette Yousef about the common Chicago policing practice of confiscating and throwing away the tents of the homeless. According to Yousef’s story, one explanation the Chicago Police Department gives to defend the practice is a law that says it’s illegal to block a public thoroughfare....

[image-1]Chicago singer Zarif Wilder found his calling by humming. Wilder, a member of local production collective ThemPeople, told Noisey earlier this year that his colleagues in ThemPeople nudged him into singing after they overheard him in the studio humming along to Mick Jenkins‘s “Shipwrecked” while the rapper recorded it. In August 2014, when Jenkins dropped his breakthrough mixtape, The Water[s], it included vocals from Wilder under the name the Mind (he prefers to style it “theMIND”)....

A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. Composer and performer Andrew Tham attempts to explain the Big TEEN manifesto. Salem is curious what’s in the rotation of . . . Darrell is curious what’s in the rotation of . . . YouTube effects-pedals demos I’ll help you move for a MASF Thornoscillator! After a year or so of embracing current and older effects pedals (noise, glitch, modulation, etc) via YouTube demos, I feel extra inspired!...

Welcome to the Reader‘s news briefing for Tuesday, May 10, 2016. Police officer shoots and kills bank robbery suspect in Archer Heights A suspect in a robbery was fatally shot by a Chicago police officer Monday morning on the southwest side. The man allegedly pointed a gun at an officer during a chase after a robbery at Byline Bank. It’s the second deadly police-involved shooting in the city since last week....

It might blow up, but it won’t go pop.” So goes the refrain that plays throughout hip-hop trio De La Soul‘s 1993 album Buhloone Mindstate, a reference to how the group’s music could appeal to a devoted audience but would never translate to popular success. The Elmhurst Art Museum’s latest production, “Blow Up: Inflatable Contemporary Art”—a traveling exhibit that debuted at the Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek, California—retools that mantra: the artworks blow up (literally) and go pop (figuratively)....