A week after indicted 20th Ward alderman Willie Cochran joked about being a “gangster” at an Aldermanic Black Caucus fund-raiser, constituents are pushing back against his plan to evict a pop-up mental health services project from a vacant lot in Woodlawn. Nortasha Stingley, whose 19-year-old daughter Marissa Boyd-Stingley was shot and killed in 2013, said she’d been enjoying the empty lot as a place to pray and walk in the mornings since moving to Woodlawn in February....

AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin The Supreme Court voted 5-4 in favor of allowing the invocations given by local ministers before monthly town board meetings in Greece, New York. I spent several hours Tuesday trying to work up a contrarian Bleader post that would give the Supreme Court two cheers for its 5-4 decision okaying the invocations given by local ministers before monthly town board meetings in Greece, New York. If these ministers are almost all Christian, so be it, said the court’s majority....

Larry Busacca/Getty Images for MTV Charli XCX performs on a red-carpet stage sponsored by State Farm at Sunday night’s Video Music Awards. In 2008 I was assigned by a prominent music magazine to cover the MTV Video Music Awards for its blog. That might sound like torture to some people, but I eagerly accepted. I needed the money (probably the biggest reason), but I was also curious to witness the state of the delightfully obnoxious awards show....

Bored Reaching Bored seemed as easy as dialing 773-669-TURD. Bored styled an Albany Avenue sidewalk to resemble a Monopoly-board square, with a pair of to-scale green houses stuck to the pavement. Outside of Lula Cafe he installed a stack of wooden panels painted to look like Chance cards; the top card read Carissa, will you marry me? if yes, please advance one block south to the nearest church. A Community Chest card was more cutting: Go to jail for public douchebaggery....

AP Photos George Will throws the ceremonial first pitch before a Cubs game in April. He was later unceremoniously dumped by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. If you’re a print media groupie with a long memory, you might remember that George Will won a Pulitzer Prize in 1977 as a columnist for the Washington Post. If you can’t get enough of the Sunday morning TV talk shows, you might know him as the regular on ABC’s This Week who last October jumped to Fox News, putting him, in his golden years (he’s 73), in company too cozy by half....

Lots of underground black-metal bands shun media attention: they refuse to grant interviews, maintain no online presence, conceal their members’ names, and hide their faces in photos (or simply make no photos available). I’ve long assumed that these bands just don’t want press—that they’d rather not deal with an influx of gawkers and rubberneckers eager to slum it among musicians with titillating reputations for occultism, misanthropy, or worse. Thoughtfulness characterizes everything about the face that False present to the public....

Hiroshima, Mon Amour One of the current programs at the University of Chicago’s Doc Films is a partial retrospective of work by the great French filmmaker Alain Resnais, who passed away in March. The series, which wraps up Wed 6/4 with a screening of the recently restored Je t’aime, Je t’aime; in advance of Doc’s presentation, the Gene Siskel Film Center screens the film on Mon 5/26, which gives Chicago moviegoers double the chance to catch one of the director’s rarest films....

In his various stints as hatchet man for Mayors Daley and Emanuel, Forrest Claypool has earned a reputation for being a rigid, penny-pinching bureaucrat. The article takes us back to 1998, when Claypool was Mayor Daley’s Park District superintendent, making his name by, among other things, privatizing high-paying city jobs. Now, I know you’re probably thinking that it’s hypocritical for a rules stickler like Claypool to so obviously flaunt the rules and waste everyone’s tax dollars on something as frivolous as directing a Park District employee to keep score of the boss’s pickup basketball game....

As we face the ongoing Dyett hunger strike and a new school year of cuts, tax hikes, and maybe even another teachers’ strike, I’d like to offer a little bit of good news about public education in the age of Mayor Emanuel. Pay attention, everyone—this may come in handy. Or it might be that parents, teachers, and community members have been bugging him relentlessly about a particular school. Apparently the amount of squawk a wheel has to squeak to get some grease is a relative thing in Chicago....

Michael Yarish/AMC Don Draper (Jon Hamm) and Megan Draper (Jessica Pare) in Mad Men “Are you ready? Because I want you to pay attention. This is the beginning of something.” We’ve spent the better part of six seasons exploring the following, and from lots of angles: Who is Don Draper? We seem to get more insight when he loses scope—or a wife or a lover or a job or anything that’s integral to the persona he’s created—so a good thing about season seven is that he’s lost a lot!...

California rapper OMB Peezy has lived in Sacramento since he was 12, but he was raised in Mobile, Alabama. Since this winter, when I first got hooked on the gumbo-funk melody of the 20-year-old’s breakout single, “Lay Down,” he’s risen to the lower tiers of national prominence. He’s attracted the attention of the Fader and Complex (among others), and in May he landed a record deal with 300, but he’s still just the second performer on a four-act bill tomorrow night at Reggie’s Rock Club....

Michael Gebert Plating venison, one of the few meats Mexico had before 1492 How do you make a seven-course Mexican meal without pork or beef, without limes, without garlic or onions? That’s the challenge that Rick Bayless’s Topolobampo just set itself—because Mexican cuisine had none of those things before the Spanish arrived and brought them. The result is that rarely do you feel deprived of anything in the meal—maybe only when the absence of dairy is most obvious, as with a boniato (sweet potato) puree....

Any book about a young girl growing up in a poor immigrant neighborhood in a large city sometime in the early part of the last century faces comparison to Betty Smith’s classic A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and usually suffers for it. Ronna Wineberg’s first novel, On Bittersweet Place, is no exception. The best and most powerful sections of On Bittersweet Place are the ones that concern Lena’s parents, Reesa and Chaim (aka Henry), who were brought together in an arranged marriage and whose loyalty to each other is frequently at odds with a fundamental difference in temperaments and the scars of their shared history: while he went ahead to America to earn money to bring the rest of the family over and fell in love with a beautiful, gentle, and Gentile woman, she was left behind with the children in Belilovka to face a war and a devastating pogrom....

Southern Avenue are named after the original Memphis address of Stax Records, and that tells you most of what you need to know about their sound. Their self-titled debut—on Stax itself, naturally—is a boiling retro-soul primer. Israeli guitarist Ori Naftaly can be a bit fussy, but at his best he plays dirty blues licks that would make Billy Gibbons smile from behind his beard. Drummer Tikyra Jackson keeps the beat crisp and soulful....

Two years ago, when the cabaret musical theater company Theo Ubique announced that it would be relocating a mile north from the No Exit Cafe in Rogers Park, its snug, hidden oasis-like home of 13 years, to Evanston, critics and fans alike poured one out for the beloved venue. Director Fred Anzevino and music director Jeremy Ramey’s company was largely distinguished by its exceptional use of the tight space, which they filled with illustrious voices and ensembles that befitted a significantly larger room....

Jason Van Dyke shot Laquan McDonald because McDonald threatened him with a knife, Van Dyke told a detective at the scene of the fatal shooting. In a second interview a few hours later, Van Dyke, the Chicago police officer now charged with McDonald’s murder, offered further reasons why he opened fire on the 17-year-old—including concerns that McDonald’s knife could be spring-loaded or could shoot a bullet. After McDonald fell to the ground, he “continued to grasp the knife, refusing to let go of it,” March’s summary says....

I wasn’t aware of the Clean India Mission before I saw Toilet: Ek Prem Katha, an enjoyable Bollywood musical currently screening at the AMC River East. But the film, which plays a bit like an extended public service announcement, explains the roots and aims of the movement in clear enough terms to educate outsiders like me. The couple’s happiness proves to be short-lived, however. Jaya grew up in a household with modern plumbing, and she balks at having to defecate outdoors once she moves to Keshav’s village....

Squires cites the skeleton fight in Jason and the Argonauts as one of his all-time favorite effects sequences. Read part one of this interview. How many movies does a typical visual effects artist work on in a year? If I’m [designing] a building in New York that’s very reflective—you know, it has windows all down the side—it’s very easy to make it look “perfect” with computer graphics, meaning the windows come out as one flat surface....

Less than a week after Donald Trump’s election—and in the face of his plan to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, Mayor Rahm Emanuel promised that Chicago would remain a “sanctuary city,” one that doesn’t prosecute or target people solely on the basis of their immigration status. The law’s exceptions can be broken down into four different categories: An undocumented immigrant can be detained and then turned over to ICE if he or she has a criminal warrant, a prior felony conviction, a pending felony prosecution, or are in a gang database....

Among the many reasons I prefer street fests to the major festivals that descend on our public parks is that most of the smaller events do better at showcasing local musicians. To be fair, this weekend’s Mamby on the Beach has more locals than almost any other festival its size, but the Logan Square Arts Festival—which runs Friday through Sunday—has booked almost exclusively Chicago artists (with the exception of a couple headliners), and it’s much cheaper....