Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Tuesday, February 14, 2017. Happy Valentine’s Day! Activist Jedidiah Brown is reportedly OK after apparent suicide attempt Neighborhood activist Jedidiah Brown is doing better after his suicide attempt near Buckingham Fountain shut down Lake Shore Drive in the Loop for an hour and a half Sunday evening. “I’m not wanting to die anymore but whoa the pain is cutting deep,” Brown wrote in a Facebook post Monday afternoon....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Thursday, August 17, 2017. Attorney General Sessions slams Emanuel, Chicago’s sanctuary city policy in speech Attorney General Jeff Sessions attacked Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Chicago’s sanctuary city policy again Wednesday. The Department of Justice previewed the speech in a statement, saying that Sessions would “take on Chicago political leadership.” “Respect for the rule of law has broken down. In Chicago, their so-called ‘sanctuary’ policies are just one sad example,” Sessions said, according to a DOJ excerpt....

From the Ages Red Bull Sound Select, a nationwide live music program that matches up big touring names with local artists, comes to Chicago for the third time on Saturday. Leaning towards punk and more experimental acts, Red Bull’s previous Chicago stops included sets from synthy indie-pop band Metric and electronic ambient artist Tim Hecker. This time around, the energy drink giants bring San Diego instrumental trio Earthless to the Empty Bottle—their first visit to Chicago since 2009....

Q I am currently a senior in high school, but come Saturday, I will be a high-school grad! (Fuck yeah!) The only thing I’m worried about besides my hopes and dreams and making it in the real world? My sex life. I’m a virgin. When I go online, I see all my friends and peers having these crazy, awesome, smoking-hot sex lives. I am obsessed with this guy in my class....

Though they don’t do much to disguise their influences, this quartet from New Haven, Connecticut, kick up a deeply satisfying din by burrowing into their psychedelic comfort zone. On the recent eponymous album, their sixth full-length in total but first for Chicago’s ever-reliable Trouble in Mind imprint, Mountain Movers use five extended tracks to reflect different points of reference: “I Could Really See Things” suggests a more extroverted Spacemen 3, “Everyone Cares” embraces a loose, almost jazzy groove and a languid vocal sound recalling the Velvet Underground, and “Vision Television” conveys the shambling, distended thrust of Swell Maps....

Barney the Elf The Other Theatre Company’s tentative entry into Chicago’s already crowded field of campy, shlocky holiday shows suffers from fidgety staging, cluttered choreography, simplistic plotting, unnecessary musical numbers, and parody lyrics of pop and Broadway standards more workmanlike than clever. But Bryan Renaud’s alternately childlike and crude romp gets the most important element right: the unaccountable love affair between Barney, an incessantly cheery elf banished from the gay-unfriendly North Pole, and Zooey, a vain, cynical Chicago drag queen....

The film has become a severe threat to my freedom, and I’m forced to treat it accordingly,” wrote WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in a message to Oscar-winning documentary maker Laura Poitras (Citizenfour) that she reads in voice-over near the end of Risk. The movie chronicles her increasingly tangled six-year professional relationship with Assange, who has been holed up in the Ecuadoran embassy in London since June 2012, fighting extradition to Sweden on rape charges, and now faces the renewed efforts of the U....

Courtesy of the artist No, it’s cool, it’s not like your ancestors killed them all or anything, Jen Mussari In my closet there’s a shirt with a giant outline of the Hindu deity Ganesha on the front. Whenever I see the shirt, I think of cultural appropriation and view the shirt skeptically—I wonder if, when I wore it, other people around me looked at it the same way. Hamid identifies herself as a British Pakistani and wears a keffiyeh to support Syria, Palestine, and suppressed Islamic countries....

On Girlpool‘s 2015 album, Before the World Was Big, Cleo Tucker and Harmony Tividad sing, “Is it pouring out my body? / My nervous aching? / I like that you can see it.” They’ve evolved on their subsequent releases, but they still honor the venerable indie tradition of diaristic lyrics whose openness borders on exhibitionistic—they’re not growing just as musicians but also as people, figuring out what their needs are, processing their motives and feelings, and learning to take responsibility for themselves....

In January, an article in the science journal ZooKeys described a newly discovered aggressive North American ant species called Temnothorax pilagens, or “pillage ant.” Pillaging is central to the ant’s livelihood; news stories announcing its discovery, stacked with descriptions of “slave-making,” “chemical camouflage,” and “mortal fighting,” read like H.G. Wells’s The Food of the Gods, or perhaps Ant Colony, a once Web-serialized, now print-collected comic from the award-winning Canadian indie cartoonist Michael DeForge....

They’re not as famous as the Ramones or the Stooges, but the Dictators were just as instrumental in creating what we now know as punk rock. Formed in New York in 1973 and led by the swaggering, charismatic Richard “Handsome Dick” Manitoba—who started with the band as a roadie, occasional vocalist, and mascot, working his way up to full-time front man by their third LP, 1978’s Bloodbrothers—they played boneheaded tough-guy garage rock that was always smarter than it sounded....

Baby Wants Candy Accompany comedians to a bar’s karaoke night and you’ll quickly discover how tremendous the overlap is on the Venn diagram of improv versus musical theater nerds. This long-running troupe’s signature show is where the two fandoms are wedded to create an hour of giddy, off-kilter, harmonious enlightenment . . . and also some dick jokes. The current Chicago iteration, now in new digs in Judy’s Beat Lounge at Second City, promises to be a reliable source of live band-accompanied levity and whip-smart sketch weirdness....

“CM Punk! CM Punk! CM Punk!” “Don’t you know it isn’t real?” The real children in attendance were mostly there to watch Cena, the WWE’s most kid-friendly star. His trademark “U Can’t See Me” hats and wristbands were rampant in youth sizes all throughout the arena, and when the oldsters began to chant “John Cena sucks,” the kids’ shrill “Let’s go Cena!” response was almost as loud. It’s a hostile environment, in retrospect....

Over the last year we’ve looked on with horror at a half-dozen cases in Europe and New York City in which assailants have used trucks and cars as deadly weapons to intentionally injure and kill large numbers of innocent people on foot. In the wake of these awful events, it makes sense to reduce the chance of this kind of attack happening in Chicago. In the past, city, county, state, and federal authorities installed vehicle-resistant barriers around buildings and plazas that could be targets, and after a truck assault on a Berlin Christmas market last December, the Chicago police staked out the Christkindlmarket in Daley Plaza....

Riot Fest is stirring up nostalgia in a lot of people this year—and I’m no exception. When I saw Dashboard Confessional on the lineup it was like getting smacked right across the face with my high school binder covered in hand-scribbled lyrics to “Screaming Infidelities.” Revisiting The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most, the album that was responsible for all my deep teenage emotions (with a capital E-M-O), it’s pretty silly to imagine my 14-year-old self feeling so connected to songs that were about painful breakups and extreme loneliness when the most traumatic thing that had ever happened to me was missing the school bus....

VAM’s existing relationship with youth communities made it easier for Woods to let go of the reins. “They already love integrating young people into their sets,” she says, “and I hope it’s something more people do.” Woods also appreciated the relatability of Huicochea’s treatment. “I work with students at YCA [Young Chicago Authors], and what I really liked about Ashley’s treatment was that it was so personal. She would say things that I thought applied to people broadly in Chicago, but it was still like, ‘I grew up in Humboldt Park, and my family would have carne asada in the backyard....

The musical catalog of Christina Aguilera has always been erratic and somewhat frustrating. Gifted with a powerful, operatic voice, she’s struggled to find material worthy of her natural talent. In her nearly 20 years as a solo artist, she’s never managed to make an album consistent enough from front to back to rival those of her Disney Channel peers, such as Britney Spears’s 2003 record In the Zone or Justin Timberlake’s 2006 release FutureSex/Lovesounds....

Rainer Maria have as many lives as a cat. Formed in 1995 in Madison, Wisconsin, the three-piece emerged with a style and energy that situated them comfortably within the ranks of other midwestern emo bands of the day: their sound combined trembling, loosely woven guitars with half-screamed vocals volleyed between bassist Caithlin De Marrais and guitarist Kaia Fischer. But as Ian Cohen wrote in a recent Stereogum interview with the group, when Rainer Maria called it quits in 2006, they did so as a quintessential Brooklyn indie band, successful enough to sell out big clubs and tour full-time....

Earlier this summer, Chicago soul artist Christian JaLon released “Getting to Know Vinyled Love,” a short behind-the-scenes documentary about the making of her 2017 EP Vinyled Love. On that EP, she’d tried to convey what love means to her—though it was inspired by a specific relationship, she connected those feelings to her understanding of divine love, which has its roots in her connection to the church. But now that relationship is over, and on her latest EP, If You Let Me (released August 20), JaLon is ready to cleanse her musical mind of love—at least romantic love....

It’s been a brutal year. A lot of darkness has crossed our thresholds, so that even when we make time to celebrate—to embrace life and joy—we can never entirely escape all the reasons to do the opposite. With winter poised to strike and our TV and computer screens continually stained with what look like signs of the apocalypse, it’s a fine time to consider five of 2015’s most wretchedly, painfully slow albums—they don’t even try to put the “fun” in “funeral doom,” and that feels awfully appropriate....