Rich Hein/Sun-Times Media It’s important to remember that when it comes to the TIF surplus, Mayor Rahm gives to the schools with one hand and takes with the other. Around the time Mayor Emanuel was unveiling his latest TIF reform, I started getting calls from exasperated teachers and parents about the games being played with the mayor’s last TIF reform. Like whatever really dumb idea Mayor Emanuel’s cooking up—e.g., a Marriott hotel and DePaul B-ball arena in the South Loop....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Thursday, July 6, 2017. Illinois house delays override vote on Rauner veto until Thursday, depending on attendance Illinois house speaker Michael Madigan has scheduled the house’s expected override vote of Governor Bruce Rauner’s veto of a state budget plan for Thursday. The vote had been expected earlier, but wasn’t called due to low attendance Tuesday and Wednesday after 14 straight days of session for the Illinois General Assembly....

Mike Reed says summer in Chicago means two things: music festivals and gun violence. “It’s kind of a brain fuck,” says Reed, who’s not just a drummer, promoter, and venue owner but also the founding director of the Pitchfork Music Festival. Because last year’s spike in shootings contributed to the city’s highest murder tally in nearly two decades, this year the festival is acknowledging Chicago’s gun violence—and trying to raise awareness of organizations that are doing something about it....

Currently on Twitter, there are seven accounts for RPM Steak, the carnecentric analogue to nearby RPM Italian. Among them are @RPMSteakChicago, @RPMSteakDC, @RPMSteakVegas, @RPMSteakNYC, and @RPMSteakLA. No one has tweeted from any of these accounts yet, and on a couple of them there’s even a forceful ALL CAPPED command to go follow the official @RPMSteakChi. Move along now. Nothing to see here. Let’s look at some of those familiar starters. A pair of small “coal roasted” king crab legs—a couple of joints really—is served in a giant bowl filled with what looks like road salt....

It’s not often that a stand-up comedy show includes a ticketing option for “lawn seats,” and, quite frankly, I can’t imagine a lot of stand-ups would be at their most thrilling in such a setting. But Funny or Die’s Oddball Comedy Festival has made outdoor-arena seating work for a crop of indie comics gone big. The festival got off to a rollicking start last year because it marked Dave Chappelle’s high-profile return (complete with a high-profile onstage “meltdown,” as it was called, in Hartford)....

For around 20 years, beginning in 1963 and ending in 1983 (give or take It’s Only Rock and Roll or Undercover, depending on when you think the band totally lost steam), the Rolling Stones were consistently in the running for being the biggest and best rock ‘n’ roll group on earth. They came close to averaging one full-length release a year, and all of them are at least very good—many are canonical, even ones that were somewhat dismissed at the time (Between the Buttons, Their Satanic Majesties Request, Emotional Rescue; I will defend them all)....

Young Reckless Hearts A couple of years ago Oakland-based glammy-garage rock band Bare Wires called it a day, and front man Matthew Melton immediately started up Warm Soda, whose second record, Young Reckless Hearts, is due out on Castle Face Records in March. The glam-rock spirit of Bare Wires is still present in Warm Soda, but the lo-fi vibe and behind-the-beat swagger is gone, and in its place is slick, clean production and a straightforward power-pop energy....

On November 13, 11th Ward alderman James Balcer introduced a City Council resolution calling for a hearing to consider renaming the Chicago Cultural Center. According to the resolution, in February 1972, when the building was threatened with destruction and her husband, Mayor Richard J. Daley, had just appointed a committee to study its future, Sis made “a rare public comment.” She responded to a reporter’s question by saying that she was “for restoring and keeping all the beautiful buildings in Chicago....

Son of a Gun Valentine’s Day is Friday, but even if hokey lovey-dovey cliches about romance aren’t your thing, there’s still fun to be had this week. Just take a look at the concert calendar. “Garrett Luczak of Chicago band Son of a Gun seems to have figured out how to get around that eternal conundrum ‘Ars longa, vita brevis,’” writes Brian Costello. “It’s the same solution arrived at by your Reatards, Dwyers, and Segalls: get your songs recorded on that four-track now, don’t worry whether they’re ‘finished’ just yet, and then find the band to play them....

Q: I am a 26-year-old heterosexual European man. I have been for four years in a monogamous relationship with my girlfriend. Recently she cheated on me. When she told me what she did, I felt a very strong pain, even stronger than I expected. After a few days of pain, however, I found that the sexual attraction for my girlfriend, instead of decreasing, increased after her adventure. In particular, I am now having a cuckold fantasy....

Genre-bending California five-piece band Deafheaven have just about perfectly mastered the art of harnessing metal ferocity to a shimmering, shifting, rolling sound that’s perversely relaxing and soothing, at least as much as anything with howling and blastbeats can get. The band’s fourth full-length, Ordinary Corrupt Human Love (Anti-), is a sweeping, epic master class in what could be called shoegaze only if the shoes in question were the otherwordly stomping boots of the gods....

Hip-hop workhorse and D.C. native Amir Mohamed, aka Oddisee, reveres soul, particularly the tunes by another fellow from his hometown, Marvin Gaye. In 2012 Mohamed reworked “Ain’t That Peculiar,” an R&B chart topper that appears on 1966’s Moods of Marvin Gaye, as part of an EP of reimagined tracks called Odd Renditions. When he dropped Tangible Dream the following year he included “The Goings On,” a tender, mellow soul number with slowly sashaying boom-bap percussion and a sweet vocal hook that fondly recalls the title track of Gaye’s What’s Going On....

In 2012, Shanna Collins went to her first black-run DIY punk show in Chicago. It wasn’t long after 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was shot dead in Florida while walking to the home of his father’s girlfriend carrying a can of Arizona fruit juice cocktail and a bag of Skittles. “I was experiencing a lot of anger,” she says. “A lot of disenchantment with a lot of systems.” In 2017, Collins became a member of the Black and Brown Punk Show Collective herself....

In celebration of its 150th academic year, the School of the Art Institute is pulling out the big guns. This fall’s alumni exhibition, “Civilization and Its Discontents,” curated by SAIC faculty members and brothers Scott Reeder and Tyson Reeder, features work by notable graduates from the past 30 years, including Jeff Koons, Tony Tasset, Rashid Johnson, Rebecca Morris, Chris Ware, Amanda Ross-Ho, Angel Otero, Tony Lewis, Anya Davidson, Aspen Mays, Carrie Schneider, Zak Prekop, Golden Age, and many others....

“What does dance do besides make stories?” New York-based choreographer Tere O’Connor asks in Long Run, which proceeds in episodes enacted by subsets of his troupe of eight dancers, structured by scenes that accumulate without converging on a plot. “Is there a causality of some sort, or are we just looking at a choreographed randomness?” he muses. “Maybe every choreographer is going through some kind of drama of trying to control or hold on to time....

During the final days of his presidency, Barack Obama commuted the sentences of 64 people in prison. One of them was Oscar López Rivera. Depending on who you ask, the 74-year-old is either a freedom fighter, political prisoner, and activist or a terrorist. He was a member of Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional Puertorriqueña (FALN), a paramilitary organization that claimed responsibility for more than 120 bombings in Chicago, New York, and Washington, D....

Makoto Shinkai’s anime feature Your Name is the most beautiful-looking movie in town—although François Ozon’s Frantz, which opens this Friday at the Landmark, will surely give Your Name a run for its money. Incidentally, both films are romantic dramas that deal with characters entering into the lives of strangers, but while Frantz is relatively realistic, Your Name is a delirious fantasy. The latter, in fact, may be too delirious for American audiences....

Around 100 people gathered in the pews of the Chicago Temple building Monday night looking for faith-based answers to the gun violence that has ravaged the south and west sides of the city. The panel and conversation they came for portrayed the violence plaguing the city, and the nation, as multifaceted as the stained glass of the temple hall. Though the conversation meandered—touching on everything from the bond system to the letters Dart has sent President Donald Trump—its main focus was the history of race, racism, and disinvestment in the city....

The 27th Polish Film Festival in America runs Friday, November 6, through Sunday, November 22, at Facets Cinematheque, 1517 W. Fullerton; Rosemont 18, 9701 Bryn Mawr, Rosemont; and Society for Arts, 1112 N. Milwaukee. Tickets are $15, and a festival pass, good for seven screenings, is $75; for more information call 773-486-9612 or pffamerica.com. These Daughters of Mine Two sisters—the older a bitchy TV star (Agata Kulesza), the younger a fragile underachiever (Gabriela Muskala)—lock horns after their mother is left comatose by a stroke and their father is diagnosed with a brain tumor....

The explosion of American independent filmmaking in the 1960s and ’70s was largely an all-male affair (surprise), but a few talented women also got their hand in during this vital and changing period. The Chicago Film Society is showing one such effort, Juleen Compton’s 1966 rarity The Plastic Dome of Norma Jean, which has been recently rediscovered and restored, on Wednesday, August 15. We’ve selected another five diverse titles below....