Current exhibits at Harold Washington Library Center, Chicago History Museum, Art Center Highland Park, College of DuPage, vivianmaier.com, vivianmaier.photography.com Marketing campaigns for dead artists are nothing new—think of all the hoopla for those long-gone French impressionists. But the meteoric posthumous rise of local photographer Vivian Maier, fueled by an intriguing discovery story and the power of the Internet, is unprecedented. Maier died impoverished and unknown in April 2009. Six months later, local real estate agent John Maloof—who’d previously bought a box containing 30,000 Maier negatives for $400 at an auction—posted a few of the pictures on the Flickr forum Hardcore Street Photography....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Wednesday, May 31, 2017. Rahm counters Census Bureau data with U-Haul report Chicago was the only major U.S. city to lose population in 2016, according to a Census Bureau report. But after its release last week, Mayor Rahm Emanuel quickly tried to refute the data, citing a U-Haul report that “determined Chicago ranked No. 2 in the nation for one-way drop-offs of the company’s trucks and trailers....

In mid-June, the city finally released the Vision Zero Action Plan, which lays out its strategy to eliminate serious and fatal traffic crashes. It arrived about six months later than originally planned—and years after peer cities launched similar programs. But it could not have come a moment too soon; more than 2,000 people per year are killed or seriously injured in collisions in Chicago, with an average of one fatality every three days....

After a 13-month investigation of the Chicago Police Department, the U.S. Department of Justice announced its findings Friday. In a 164-page report, the DOJ revealed that Chicago police officers have systematically engaged in unconstitutional and unreasonable use of force over the course of the last four years. These patterns include shooting at and using Tasers on suspects who don’t present a threat, shooting at vehicles, using force “to retaliate against and punish individuals,” and using excessive force on juveniles....

Wakefield, a Bryan Cranston-starring indie feature currently playing at the Landmark Century Centre, is a real dud. Uneventful and dull to look at, the film adapts a short story by E.L. Doctorow that probably should have stayed on the page. It’s one of those movies where the problems seem rooted in its conception—the narrative is bound to one man’s interior life, something that’s difficult to realize in images. Writer-director Robin Swicord falls back on Doctorow’s words to explicate the content, providing few inventive visual ideas, which wouldn’t be a problem if the language Swicord was working with were musical or otherwise pleasurable to hear....

On Dichotomy Desaturated (In the Red), his second solo outing under the CFM moniker, Charles Moothart once again played everything—though his pal Ty Segall contributes drums on one track—crafting an elegant strain of lumbering hard rock that shows impressive growth from his eponymous 2016 debut. Quite a few tracks feature strummed acoustic guitar, but despite a superficial airiness now and again, the music’s foundation is built on the sort of swinging hard rock perfected nearly five decades ago by Black Sabbath....

Formed in Nice in 2004 this French blackened-death-metal band has been slowly and surely paving a path through the global metal world, upping the dose of menacing noise with each subsequent record. Profane (2013) evokes existential angst and body horror with a tool box full of vicious, atonal weaponry and an almost abstract sense of splatter from an all-dark palette. Now signed to Century Media and poised for their first North American tour in five years, Svart Crown are about to drop their fourth full-length, Abreaction, which brings their powers to bear on more occult and mystical themes—I suppose calling a song “Carcosa” carried more nerd cachet before True Detective, but I’ll take it....

Kate Micucci and Riki Lindhome are Garfunkel and Oates. As a musical act, Garfunkel and Oates (Riki Lindhome and Kate Micucci) have cornered a special type of comedy. They write catchy songs with smart, funny lyrics, and can say the most vulgar things while still appearing cute as buttons. Their YouTube videos, which started simple—the duo would sit on a couch and sing about things like being 29 versus being 31 and giving hand jobs—eventually became blown-out, MTV-style music videos for songs like “This Party Took a Turn for the Douche” and “The Loophole....

July 10 was another productive day for Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s fund-raising machine. Chicago Forward, the political action committee put together by some of the mayor’s friends and run by his former aides, reported collecting $325,000 in contributions that day from just six people. The flurry followed the PAC’s $1 million haul in the last week of June from eight funders. As Chicagoans are starting to realize, regulations governing campaign contributions are limited....

Chicago offers no shortage of opportunities to see freely improvised music any day of the week, but in the coming days two shows stand out for me. One features European musicians who don’t get here very often, and the other is by three Chicagoans who play in different contexts all the time. Both are exciting in different ways. Young local trio ZRL, which celebrates the release of an impressive self-titled cassette on the No Index label with a performance Sunday night at the Hungry Brain, consists of players better known through their associations with new-music ensembles such as Mocrep and Fonema Consort....

For the last two years Mayor Emanuel’s been waging war on the students in Chicago public schools—or at least their teachers—with his cuts and closings. Just so you know, the play is about more than Mayor Emanuel. It’s also about teenage angst and anxiety and street violence in Chicago. The show’s directed by Ricardo Gamboa, a writer, filmmaker and performer who was born and raised on the southwest side (Brother Rice, class of ’99)....

UPDATE: According to neighbors and preservationists, the threatened building at 159 W. Burton Place was sold last week to a buyer who intends to preserve it. The announcement, posted August 15 at the neighbors’ website, Save Our Story, Save Our Street, is here. West Burton Place is an odd little street between LaSalle and Wells, just south of North Avenue. Stumble onto it, as you might during an Old Town stroll, and you’re in for a surprise—it’s as if you’d turned a corner and stepped into a slightly weirder world....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Wednesday, March 8, 2017. Chicago Jewish Day School evacuated due to bomb threat The Chicago Jewish Day School in Edgewater was evacuated Tuesday morning after a bomb threat was called in. Police and bomb-sniffing dogs searched the school and nothing was found. The school was one of the at least 12 Jewish days schools and community centers to receive a bomb threat Tuesday....

Spike Lee never had a chance. That’s been clear since April, when the bile burst forth in response to the title of his new movie: Chi-Raq. A portmanteau of “Chicago” and “Iraq,” the term unfavorably compares shooting deaths in this city with those of Americans serving in Iraq. It originated with drill, a menacing, nihilistic, and violent hip-hop sound that rocketed from Chicago’s south side to rap’s hilltop a few years ago....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Thursday, March 2, 2017. Alderman Sophia King keeps her seat in special election Alderman Sophia King easily won the Fourth Ward special election Tuesday with 64 percent of the vote, allowing her to keep her seat and avoid a runoff election. King was appointed to the seat by Mayor Rahm Emanuel after former alderman Will Burns resigned, and faced four challengers in the special election, during which she was endorsed by her longtime friend, former president Barack Obama....

Netherfriends main man Shawn Rosenblatt is ambitious—he wrote and recorded a song in every state for a project called 50 Songs 50 States, which he released in full last year via an interactive online map. The psych-pop multi-instrumentalist has since dropped one of my favorite albums of the year, the life-affirming P3ACE, and he continues to build on that album with a five-part film project, “Untitled.” Rosenblatt has already released the first three parts of “Untitled,” and today’s 12 O’Clock Track is the exclusive premiere of the fourth part, which is a music video for the beautifully melancholic “Birthday....

Nico Soto/Guazu Media Daniela Speranza on the set of Rambleras In the first part of my conversation with Daniela Speranza, the Uruguayan writer-director explained that it took ten years to complete her recent feature Rambleras (which had its local premiere last weekend at the Chicago Latino Film Festival). Speranza’s perseverance is admirable in itself, yet it also accounts for the innumerable little pleasures of the finished film. Speranza refined the script as the years went on, making the characterizations more lifelike and evenhanded....

Coming-of-age movies never go out of style. There are two reasons for this: First, teenagers make up a huge portion of the movie market, and they like watching stories close to their own experience. Second, when aspiring writers dredge their own lives for drama, laughs, or wisdom, their coming-of-age is often the first thing that bobs to the surface. (Sometimes it’s the only thing.) Because there are so many coming-of-age movies, one needs to discriminate, and for me the determining factor has always been idiosyncrasy....

OOIOO The 90s are back! Veruca Salt plays on Monday, and that’s something to get excited for. Unfortunately, the show is sold out. While they’re not the blast of angsty nostalgia Veruca Salt would have been, there are some other great shows to see at the beginning of this week. Afrobeat star Seun Kuti comes to the Concord this week. Peter Margasak says of his new album A Long Way to the Beginning, “The new album’s ferocious opener, ‘IMF,’ brings a classic Afrobeat groove to a full boil with chattering brass and choppy, cross-cutting funk—and the lyrics don’t hold back either, renaming the IMF ‘International Motherfuckers....

An American in Paris By all rights An American in Paris should be an exercise in nostalgia. Based on the 1951 movie musical starring Gene Kelly and featuring such chestnutty Gershwin classics as “I Got Rhythm”, it tells the tale of Jerry Mulligan, an ex-GI who falls in love while trying to make it as an artist in the City of Light. Thanks to playwright Craig Lucas and director-choreographer Christopher Wheeldon, however, the show doesn’t depend on schmaltz for its richness....