Jessica Miglio/FOX Without a Batman, the cops (Donal Logue, Ben McKenzie) are Gotham’s “good guys.” Are we so averse to the thought of seeing Ben Affleck’s lantern jaw under the iconic cowl that we’ve retconned Batman right out of the story? OK, that’s not exactly what’s happening on Fox’s Gotham, a new series by Bruno Heller (Rome, The Mentalist). But it is a Batman-less existence for the denizens of Gotham, a city where billionaires are gunned down in alleys, the police dance with the devil—er, mob—in the pale moonlight, and innocent children are orphaned....

Changeling Jersey Boys, Clint Eastwood’s latest film, opened this Friday, and it’s based on the popular stage musical about Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. Eastwood strikes me as the ideal director to translate this story to screen because many of his films are alternately affectionate and critical explorations of forms and customs indigenous to American art and culture, including jazz (Bird), country music (Honkytonk Man), the film western (Unforgiven, Bronco Billy), and now, doo-wop....

On a recent Saturday morning in Veterans Park on the far southeast side, Olga Bautista crouched on the bocce court drawing lines in the sand with a stick. Eighteen girls, ranging in age from three to 18, sat on a bench, watching. “This is Torrance Avenue,” she said, pointing at the line down the middle, “and this is 95th, and over here’s 100th. That’s South Deering, and there’s Jeffery Manor. I grew up over there....

The beloved bar and nightclub Danny’s Tavern may close at the end of the month after nearly 30 years in Bucktown, according to managing owner Kevin Stacy. “They just want to kick us out and tear it down. What we don’t get is why they won’t sell it to us, because another business is not going to move in here,” Stacy continues. “We own the liquor license. Once it stops being Danny’s it stops being anything except for a teardown....

Saxophonist and composer Laura Toxvaerd has been on the Danish jazz scene since the turn of the century, but she isn’t nearly as well-known as she deserves to be. Last year Toxvaerd released three equally powerful albums with three different combos—including Pladeshop, a trio recording featuring dazzling pianist Simon Toldam and veteran drummer Marilyn Mazur. Each effort has its own sound, but Toxvaerd’s grainy, biting tone is constant across the three records, whether she’s delivering tender balladry or blowing jagged phrases that knife across the sound field....

The first rule of Meow Meetup: When other attendees ask about your Instagram, it’s a trick question. What they’re inquiring about isn’t you—sorry, human—it’s your cat’s social media presence. But what kind of emperors will these tiny carnivorous mammals make? I must admit that, as a brand-new owner of a kitten, I left the meet-up feeling a bit insecure. Remember when ownership was mostly a matter of taking care of your cat’s sustenance, shelter, litter box, and in exchange for—if you’re lucky—some affection?...

Given the cynicism and ugliness of the recent box-office hits The Hitman’s Bodyguard, Annabelle: Creation, and Wind River, the current rerelease of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) feels like a welcome breath of fresh air. Justly celebrated for its warmth and sincerity, Close Encounters shames most contemporary blockbusters for their lack of heart and imagination. The film envisions human contact with extraterrestrial life as a celebratory event; the characters’ efforts to understand the strange life-forms—through scientific inquiry, culture, and curiosity—represent the best of humankind....

It’s a bit strange to hear the drowsy, conversational singing of Kurt Wagner dipped in alien AutoTune effects on Lambchop’s recent album FLOTUS (Merge), but nearly every record in the band’s voluminous discography contains elements that distinguish it from its predecessors. Opener “In Care of 8675309,” a wry reference to the Tommy Tutone hit, unfolds languidly over 11 minutes, and the vocal treatment comes to make more sense as the track progresses and Wagner calmly considers an existential crisis via one quotidian event after another, with a refrain that keeps circling back to “the house of cancer....

When an oyster is perfectly shucked—that is, when its shucker is dexterous with his knife and neatly separates the creature’s shell without scrambling its stomach, feathery gills, or invisibly beating heart, or chipping off any nacreous shrapnel into its delicate anatomy—and then is gently laid on a bed of crushed ice without losing a drop of its precious liquor, it is still alive. I can’t think of very many animals you can eat live without getting arrested....

Rick Majewski moved to Chicago to study photography at Columbia College in 2008, when digital was edging out film and disruption was the order of the day in journalism. “I wanted to be a photojournalist at the worst possible time,” the 30-year-old says. Despite the gloomy job prospects, Majewski pushed on. He’d been inspired by a road trip he took before moving to Chicago, during which he went to Baja California, with a photographer friend who’d traveled extensively through Mexico....

Brooklyn’s Uniform and Portland’s the Body are two of the world’s harshest purveyors of postindustrial noise, so it was really only a matter of time before these like-minded duos joined forces to up the ante. On this summer’s Mental Wounds Not Healing (Sacred Bones), the members of both bands bring all their signature tricks to the table in laying out seven succinct tracks of unadulterated darkness. Some songs drag behind the beat due to the purposeful sludge-drumming of the Body’s Lee Buford, while his bandmates grind ahead, propelled by the pushy, repetitive electronic beats....

Saba is one of Chicago’s best current musical exports. He’s spent most of April and May touring the U.S. and Canada in support of the alternately scalding and beautiful Care for Me, and his late-afternoon Red Stage set on Friday at Pitchfork was his first hometown show of the year. The emotional epicenter of that self-released album, which came out in April, is “Prom/King,” a vivid, even-handed recounting of the 24-year-old rapper’s friendship with his murdered cousin, Walter Long Jr....

A combo of tortured and defiant, the hard-nasal wail of Salvation front man Jason Sipe is one that every angsty young punk who grew up on the streets of the 90s fantasized about. Like Cobain meets Yow meets Dremel Saw-Max applied to pavement, it slices through the trio’s loosey-goosey noise rock—which lands somewhere between the posthardcore of early era Rye Coalition and the manic punk of Louisville’s long-gone Lords—and drags the gnarled remnants behind....

Eat chocolates, little girl; Eat chocolates! Believe me, there is no metaphysics in the world other than chocolates; Believe me, all the religions together do not teach more than the candy shop,” wisely wrote the late Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. His words came to me after I entered the Logan Square storefront of Katherine Anne Confections. The salted-caramel iced drinking chocolate ($5, with a flight of three for $9) obliterated any further considerations from my mind....

The New Yorker‘s Adam Gopnik has an essay in the forthcoming May 15 issue that looks back at the American revolution and wonders if we’ve hopelessly romanticized it. The revolution, he writes, can be understood as the New World edition of a “much larger political quarrel throughout the British Empire” between radical reformers and “intellectuals and aristocrats” committed to a robust, efficient, and profitable empire. The first gave us the USA; the second gave us Canada....

In the waning days of the Obama administration, the Department of Homeland Security announced the recipients of $10 million worth of grants through its flagship counterterrorism initiative vaguely monikered “Countering Violent Extremism” (CVE). These were mostly law enforcement and community organizations, including two local groups, the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority (or ICJIA, a state agency that creates policy and researches ways to make the state justice system more efficient) and Life After Hate (a nonprofit that works to “off-ramp” people from white supremacist and other extremist movements)....

Over the past few months I’ve regularly basked in the liquid guitar, sensual singing, and seductive grooves of Urgent Jumping! East African Musiki Wa Dansi Classics (Sterns). The two-disc, 27-track anthology consists of music recorded mostly in Kenya and Tanzania between 1972 and 1982, a golden era when ideas flowed freely from Congo toward the eastern coast. Along the way Congolese soukous mingled with local traditions: in Kenya the result was called zilizopendwa, in Tanzania zilipendwa (both terms translate roughly as “golden oldies”)....

If the names Brandi Denise and Kellye Howard sound familiar, it’s because they’re two of the hardest-working stand-ups in town, regularly featured in lineups around Chicago. But now the comics have paired up to show their fans more of their talents, and in the process introduce new audiences to local performers who don’t often leave the north side. Because they run their own show Denise and Howard have the power to play whomever they want, regardless of gender or race....

If there was ever a place that made me wish the Reader rated restaurants on a four-star scale, it’s A10, Matthias Merges’s much-anticipated foray into Hyde Park. I’m tempted to hold A10 to both a higher and a lower standard. Higher because Merges has not only Charlie Trotter’s on his resumé but Yusho, his spunky izakaya in Avondale, and Billy Sunday, a bespoke cocktail bar in Logan Square. Lower because the bar has been set depressingly low in Hyde Park, a destination that cries out for the quality restaurants found in those northwest-side hoods....

More than 30 years in, progressive-metal legends Neurosis know exactly how to deliver—their 11th studio album, last fall’s Fires Within Fires (Neurot), is a ruthlessly efficient travelogue of varied soundscapes and altered consciousness. It feels much longer than it actually is (about 40 minutes), and that’s not a function of tedium but of density. The claustrophic and ominous crushing weights of “Bending Light” and “Fire Is the End Lesson” give way to the unsettling atmospherics of the intro to “Broken Ground,” and if you have the ominous feeling you’re being set up for something, you’re right—that song and “Reach” build to a sort of apocalyptic climax not too far removed from a Swans or Psychic TV incantation....