My favorite film by Agnès Varda—who arrives in town tomorrow for a weeklong residency at the University of Chicago—is the shorts compilation Cinevardaphoto. It’s an ideal introduction to her career, illustrating her artistic practice as it extends from still photography to moving pictures. (Two of the three pieces included in that work are featured in a program that Varda attends this Sunday afternoon at the Logan Center for the Arts.) In each of the shorts, Varda employs cinematic means (editing, narration, camera movement) to bring still images to life and then interrogate their meaning....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Tuesday, February 28, 2017. Without more state funding, CPS will end school 20 days early Chicago Public Schools will have to end the 2016-2017 school year 20 days early, on June 1, if the cash-strapped district doesn’t get more funding from the state, according to CPS CEO Forrest Claypool. “This is the worst-case scenario,” he said. “We have very few options left.” Among the possibilities: a court could order the state to give CPS more money....

A six-pack of Contact High looks like a power-up in a video game about drinking beer. Saint Louis brewery 4 Hands (not to be confused with Tired Hands, which is based in Pennsylvania) has been distributing in Chicago for months now. Unless you leave the autopilot on when you do your beer shopping, you’ve seen their stuff—including Cast Iron Oatmeal Brown, Divided Sky Rye IPA, Reprise Centennial Red, and Smoked Pigasus porter....

I recently noted that the cover of the latest issue of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s quarterly Intelligence Report features a huge picture of Trump’s head in full berserk mode, along with the headline “The Year in Hate and Extremism.” This week I received a “special appeal” from the American Civil Liberties Union asking me to support its “effective leadership role in resisting Donald Trump’s attempts to undermine the Constitution and trample on the rights of vulnerable people....

I’ve worked in the service industry for years, and for the most part, I have been totally confused by wine. My question to Andrew was simple: What wines should we pair with classic Chicago foods? Rich, decadent, but with an acidic backbone. Bright enough to cut the fat, while the interplay of crunch, salt, and brightness is perfect. Pro tip: a dollop of caviar makes those bites of dark meat pop....

The rampant murders of women and girls in the Mexican border town of Ciudad Juárez have been the subject of global attention since the mid 1990s, when the phenomenon first began drawing international headlines. Journalists, activists, musicians, novelists, television producers, and filmmakers (for starters) have used the city’s serial sexual assassinations to call for sweeping judicial reform as well as create danceable pop tunes (Tori Amos’s “Juárez”). As he does throughout the play, Gomez adeptly captures subtle efforts to forge a sense of normalcy amid horror, as the women refuse to break from their comfortable routines until a miserable truth becomes inescapable....

In a cool room with brick walls, blankets block any light coming through the windows. In the middle of the room, three overhead projectors sit opposite a white screen, where four actors perform as silhouettes, then quickly run behind the projectors to place and move the slides that create the set and backdrop for their performance. Much like an assembly line, there are many moving parts in this rehearsal space as Manual Cinema prepares for the July 19 Chicago debut of The End of TV at the Chopin Theatre....

If I’m looking on the bright side—which, of course, I always am—the latest skirmish involving Mayor Emanuel’s policies for the schools is a lot less contentious than his last one. I’m talking about the ongoing fallout over an op-ed in the Sun-Times on May 9 that was written by Troy LaRaviere, principal of Blaine, a grammar school in Lakeview. His essay exploded like a bomb. Within hours, thousands of principals, teachers, and parents were e-mailing it back and forth as if to say, finally—someone on the inside dares to tell the truth!...

Arktika Local sludgy instrumental-postmetal band Pelican have just posted a stream of their upcoming Arktika, a self-released live double LP due out on 8/26. The recording—expertly captured by the band’s sound engineer Matt Hannigan at a 2013 show in Russia and mixed in Chicago by guitarist Dallas Thomas—is an hour-long, head-first dive into the rumbling dynamics and wall-of-sound guitars that the band specialize in. The highlight of this excellent recording is the set’s finale, “Mammoth,” a cut off of Pelican’s debut self-titled EP, a groovy bruiser of a track that perfectly showcases the massively heavy riffage and hypnotic repetition that became the band’s hallmark over a decade ago....

When British pop phenom Charli XCX announced the release of last month’s mixtape Number 1 Angel, she debuted three songs on BBC Radio 1—including “Lipgloss,” which features Chicagoan Elizabeth Harris, who raps as Cupcakke. Plenty of local MCs broke out nationally last year, but Cupcakke’s rise might have been the most anomalous—in part because she didn’t benefit perceptibly from Chance the Rapper’s gravitational pull. Her absurdly raunchy raps are likewise far afield from Chicago’s current strains of street rap, but Cupcakke has explained to the Fader that her “freaky records” share that subgenre’s drive to push things to extremes....

The Helio Sequence, formed in 1999 by Brandon Summers and Benjamin Weikel, in Beaverton, Oregon, have spent the past two decades pushing the boundaries of indie-pop. The duo’s first handful of releases walk the line between digital and organic, their songs boiling over with layers of bubbly synth, bright guitars, and harsh static. They’re the type of records you can get lost in, like shoegaze rock for a new era. But starting with 2008’s Keep Your Eyes Ahead (Sub Pop), the Helio Sequence have given themselves more breathing room—while still surreal and challenging, the songs on that album rely more on melodic sophistication and structure than on heady ambience and unhinged volume....

Nine minutes into his State of the Union address, on January 8, 1964—50 years ago last week—Lyndon Johnson brought up a neglected topic. Harrington stressed in The Other America that the problem of poverty was compounded by growing economic segregation. “If the middle class never did like ugliness and poverty, it was at least aware of them,” he wrote. “‘Across the tracks’ was not a very long way to go. ....

Thodos Dance Chicago has never been about one person alone. Over the last 25 years, the company has hired dancers, yes, but more importantly, it hires dance makers. During auditions for the company, founder Melissa Thodos has consistently looked for people who bring creative intangibles to the studio other than technique—a cornerstone that has made Thodos a local standout. That feeling is never more evident than during the company’s annual New Dances series, one of the city’s longest running in-house choreography incubators and an annual summer showcase that gives current and rising dancers an opportunity to hone new material, almost always different in style and tone....

Peter Hapak Beck Given how long getting across Union Park can take when it’s filled with festivalgoers, it pays to plan ahead. Pitchfork’s schedule tends to make you wish you could be in two places at once (whose idea was it to have Kelela overlap with Tune-Yards, or St. Vincent with FKA Twigs?), but barring sudden, radical advances in wormhole technology, that won’t be an option. These day-by-day, hour-by-hour itineraries, assembled by Reader staffers and a few obliging friends (plus one contest winner), ought to help you decide where to go....

Laquan McDonald was armed with a knife and acting erratically on the evening of October 20, 2014. The 17-year-old had already used the knife to pop the tire of a police car and scratch its windshield. He’d ignored orders from officers to drop the knife. He had PCP, a hallucinogenic that can cause combativeness, in his bloodstream. Gaughan, 74, was an apt draw for several reasons. He’s a 25-year veteran of the bench....

Developed during the past two and a half years by Chicago-based collective ATOM-R (Anatomical Theatres of Mixed Reality), the performance piece Kjell Theøry bores virtual holes in the traditional theater experience. Housed in the ballroom of the Graham Foundation, the work makes extensive use of wall projections, live streams, and algorithmically generated text to create a layered, hypnotic dream space. Its four performers engage with technology on a visceral level, drawing the familiar tools of iPhones and MacBooks into a luminous collaborative dialogue between human bodies and machines programmed to speak to them....

After two years of preparation and jumping through multiple legislative hoops, Dispensary 33 received its official license to sell medical cannabis Friday. It’s a big step for the dispensary—which opened its doors to the public last weekend—but there’s still a lot to do before patients can start picking up their own supply: all staff members still need to be certified by the state, and patients need to fill out a “dispensary selection form” to register Dispensary 33 as their official dispensary as well as a boatload of other forms (like new patient registration)....

Between “Takashi Murakami: The Octopus Eats Its Own Leg” at the Museum of Contemporary Art and “Then They Came for Me” at Alphawood Gallery, local residents can encounter a major contemporary Japanese artist and learn about some of the history of Japanese life in America. Yet over at Shane Campbell Gallery in the South Loop there’s a show with a Japanese painter as its focus that has received less attention but is equally worthwhile: “Yui Yaegashi: The Rain Is Gone,” the second time the gallery has presented work by the artist....

Over the course of her five-decade career, Chicago-based artist Barbara Kasten has experimented with some pretty complex processes. To create her photographic series from the late 1970s and ’80s, she carefully positioned props—often large geometric objects made from wood or plaster—among fiberglass screens, wires, mesh, mirrors, et cetera, then shot these abstract installations with a large-format camera. The resulting images are richly colored and feature a disorienting interplay between light and shadow—like a dream sequence staged in an 80s mall after hours....

A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. Rico Nasty’s appearance on Warhol.SS’s C.H.E.W., Feeding Frenzy C.H.E.W. are hands-down one of the best bands in Chicago. See them live once, and you’ll have no choice but to agree. Feeding Frenzy, their debut LP, was highly anticipated, and still the band surpassed all expectations. The first side blows by at a blistering pace, but on the second side, C....