Andrea Balducci/Wikimedia Commons From a 2008 performance of Puccini’s Tosca at the Sferisterio in Macerata, Italy Last week I had a brief exchange with my colleague Neil Young (the film critic, not the musician, though I’m sure he’d have interesting things to say about this too) regarding the climax of the British prison drama Starred Up, which ends its weeklong run at Facets tonight. I love the film through and through, whereas Young, who’s positive on the whole, considers the final passages ludicrous....

We’re still hurting from the death of Bob Abrahamian, the Chicago soul historian, archivist, and DJ who interviewed countless overlooked local talents for his weekly WHPK program Sitting in the Park. Abrahamian amassed an unmatched collection of rare records, and his family’s trying to raise funds so they can digitize and preserve every last 45. Fri 9/26 at Hyde Park’s Promontory, a benefit for that project called “Sitting in the Park Forever” features Windy City Soul Club and a handful of musicians Abrahamian promoted, among them Reggie Torian (the Impressions, the Enchanters), Cliff Curry (the Notations), and Doug Shorts (Master Plan)....

Update on Thursday, December 6, at 5:30 PM: Windy & Carl will not perform at Ambient Church Chicago due to a family emergency. Matt Jencik has been added to the beginning of the bill. Ticket holders who would prefer a refund may e-mail support@withfriends.co. Ambient Church Chicago with Steve Hauschildt, Pan•American, Justin Walter, and Matt Jencik Part of a 25th-anniversary tour celebrating the Kranky label. Sat 12/8, 7 PM, Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, 5850 S....

Journalists’ duty to inform sits uneasily with their duty to recognize now and then that the public knows all it needs to and it’s time to turn off the spigot. Journalists learn to balance these contrary responsibilities. Next Haley’s paper published—”without any sense of the impact on the family and the community,” he says—the sort of specific details of the suicide that normally come nowhere close to seeing the light of day....

Britt (right) stars with Toreenee Wolf in Unsound. Tonight at 8:30 PM and tomorrow at 6:15 PM, Darious Britt will be at the Gene Siskel Film Center to introduce Unsound, the new movie that he wrote, directed, starred in, and financed himself. Unsound is a labor of love in more ways than one, as the story is based on Britt’s real-life experience of caring for his mother, who suffers from schizoaffective disorder....

Once upon a time, hyperlocal news was seen as the bright new future of journalism. One of the brightest of the hyperlocal sites was EveryBlock, founded in 2007 by Naperville native Adrian Holovaty with a $1.1 million Knight Foundation grant. Unlike its main rival, AOL’s Patch, it wasn’t staffed by overworked and underpaid young reporters. Instead all its news came from message boards and links to public records. All at once, you could get the latest crime statistics, look for an outdoor yoga class in the park, or find out that your favorite neighborhood restaurant was about to close—and look at the business permit for the establishment slated to take its place....

Images carry more weight than ever these days, and their viral proliferation can crowd out other realities. A relentless news cycle of taped-off crime scenes, memorial shrines, and survivors mourning gun victims can, by sheer accretion, become the media shorthand for a community at risk. Chicago’s south and west sides have been plagued by this as high murder rates have come to define their neighborhoods to outsiders. But this year’s 24th annual Black Harvest Film Festival, which runs through August at Gene Siskel Film Center, includes three Chicago-based documentaries that buck the media narrative, focusing on vibrant, determined, civic-minded personalities....

As a mystery, Julia Glass’s fifth novel, And the Dark Sacred Night, fails completely. The plot ostensibly concerns the quest of Kit Noonan—fortysomething, depressed, directionless—to learn about his birth father, whom his mother has always refused to discuss, in the hope that resolving the past will help him move ahead into the future. And yet Glass persists on carrying us along on Kit’s quest, starting with a visit to his stepfather in Vermont, now divorced from Kit’s mother, Daphne, whom he had once promised he would never reveal the name of Kit’s father....

The International Exposition of Contemporary and Modern Art, now in its third year, is an intimidatingly large event that promises/threatens to overload your eyeballs as galleries descend on Navy Pier for three days of exhibitions, site-specific projects, panel discussions, and more. The disorientation can be its own experience, but for those who’d like some guidance, here are five high points to swim for amidst the aesthetic flood. Dialogues: “What Do Your Politics Get From Being in My Art?...

Named after the well-meaning but now partly discredited Bush-era education initiative No Child Left Behind and based on her own experiences, Nilaja Sun’s 80-minute show tells the story of a visiting teaching artist who tries to get a class of uninterested, hostile teenagers at a rundown school in the Bronx to put on a production of British playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker’s 1988 play Our Country’s Good. In Definition Theatre’s current revival, deftly directed by Chika Ike, the roles are divided up among an ensemble of six actors....

Ask Jill Soloway how they’re doing and they respond with a heavy sigh, “The world is a terrible place.” It’s hard not to feel this way, as Soloway writes in their new memoir, She Wants It: Desire, Power, and Toppling the Patriarchy, it seems that the world has continuously turned its back on women, people of color, queer and transgender and disabled people, and survivors of sexual violence. It’s easy to succumb to the fear and the pain that comes with inequality....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Monday, June 12, 2017. Rahm will allow the Cubs to build skyboxes if they invest more in security outside Wrigley Field Mayor Rahm Emanuel will support the Chicago Cubs’ plan for skyboxes at Wrigley Field if they invest more money in security for outside the ballpark. “It’s time now to invest in the security around your field. You have a new plaza. You need a new plan for security,” Emanuel said....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Tuesday, July 18, 2017. Chicago Water Department e-mails show attempts at firearms deals and jokes about the city’s gun violence The latest batch of e-mails from the Chicago Water Department show “a supervisor in the scandal-plagued water department used his city email account to negotiate firearms deals and make light of deadly Fourth of July violence in black neighborhoods by offering ‘Chicago Safari’ tours,” according to the Tribune....

In a recent Ghettoblaster interview with Mark Perro and Nick Chiericozzi, who cofront postpunk band the Men, Perro described the creative approach that’s led the group to produce its stylistically scattered series of albums: “We’ve tried to make the same record forever. We’ve tried to make the same exact record since the beginning, and in my mind, we haven’t accomplished that.” Despite that alleged failure the Men have emerged with some great music since they formed in 2008, particularly during their three-album run at the beginning of this decade, bookended by the pig-fuck crush of 2010’s Immaculada and 2012’s country-tinged Open Your Heart....

With the rise of the maker movement in the mid-2000s came the creation of “maker spaces,” places where people with shared interests and ideas could come together to create and engage with tools and technology and learn from each other. In July 2013, the Harold Washington Library opened the first publicly accessible maker space in Chicago, the Harold Washington Maker Lab. Harold Washington Maker Lab Mon-Thu 1-8 PM, Fri-Sat 10 AM-4 PM, Harold Washington Library Center, 400 S....

“Treasures of the Walt Disney Archives,” running through January 2015 at the Museum of Science and Industry, keeps the racist skeletons securely stowed in Walt’s vault. As the show charts the Mouse House’s technical advancements, the content omissions are numerous: a blackface production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Mickey’s Mellerdrammer (1933); the Japanese caricatures of Commando Duck (1944); Song of the South (1946), a musical deemed so insensitive it’s never been released on home video; Ariel’s dutiful Caribbean stereotype sidekick Sebastian in The Little Mermaid (1989); the Arab burlesque of Aladdin (1992)....

Every year as December rolls in, a familiar feeling of dread descends upon me. It’s got nothing to do with the holidays. Compiling year-end album lists fills me with anxiety—it’s an exercise in arbitrary ranking much of the time, but what bothers me more is the knowledge that I’ve missed out on so much stuff over the past year. Usually I start cramming, listening to albums that I’ve been putting off for months....

An ambitious and frequently overwhelming history lesson, Wael Shawky’s three-part experimental work Cabaret Crusades covers dozens of historical actors and several centuries’ worth of events over its three and a half hours. Its principal subject is the first three Crusades—which took place from the end of the 11th century to the beginning of the 13th—though Shawky also considers the seventh-century schism between Sunni and Shia Islam and various European and Middle Eastern political intrigues contemporaneous with the Crusades....

Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. Hey, did you read: That NFL quarterback Jameis Winston is trying to halt the CNN broadcast of the campus-rape documentary The Hunting Ground, which revisits the unproven allegation of sexual assault made against him in 2012 by a fellow student at Florida State University? —J.R. Jones About this year’s Bad Sex in Fiction award finalists, including Chicago’s very own Aleksandar Hemon?...

Q Is there a term that is preferred to “transgendered”? I recently wrote an article that described a MTF person I know as transgendered. The article was positive about transgendered persons I have known (she is one of many). Upon seeing a draft prior to publication, this person flipped out so hard that I felt compelled to cut off all contact with her. I also killed the article. One of her complaints was that I used the word “transgendered” to describe her, and she identifies as something other than that....