I first entered this store because of its large selection of hats. Little did I know I was entering a treasure trove. I mean, even the owner is a treasure. Alphonsus Ntamere is a biochemist who emigrated from Nigeria in 1970 and ended up quitting his job to open Unan 24 years ago; his jokes, wide grin, and words of wisdom are part of what makes this place special. But he has much more to offer than smiles and hats, which are some of the sharpest I’ve ever seen, by the way....

James Dewitt Yancey, better known as producer J Dilla, would have turned 43 yesterday. But Dilla died 11 years ago, on February, 10, 2006, just a few days after he celebrated his birthday and released his magnum opus, Donuts. The boisterous, sample-based album was far from Dilla’s last release, and not a year has gone by without another posthumous Dilla EP or full-length—most consist of unreleased material, but none have escaped Donuts‘ shadow....

Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. Hey, did you read: About the ​link between warming temperatures and the cycle of Syrian violence​?​ —Steve Bogira That Jake Arrieta has won the NL Cy Young Award, completing a Cubs’ trifecta? (Joe Maddon took manager of the year, Kris Bryant rookie of the year.) –Kate Schmidt That part of “You’re So Vain” is, in fact, about Warren Beatty? –Tal Rosenberg About John Kerry putting his foot in his mouth during remarks at the U....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Wednesday, June 14, 2017. Cook County assessor Berrios calls controversial assessments “fair and accurate” Cook County assessor Joseph Berrios slammed the Tribune‘s analysis and investigation finding that owners of high-end properties in Cook County are more likely to win property tax appeals than owners of lower-end properties, calling it “false, misleading and inaccurate,” according to WTTW’s Chicago Tonight. “The Cook County Assessor’s Office strongly disagrees with the Tribune‘s opinion, because the study they used and the methods they advocate are unreliable,” Berrios, also the chair of the Cook County Democratic Party, said at a news conference Monday....

Aimee Levitt A Blaze pizza in all its glory The fast-casual pizza was conceived, the legend goes, the fateful day in 2011 when Wetzel’s Pretzels owners Rick and Elise Wetzel wanted a quick pizza for lunch, but, finding no decent options in Pasadena, ended up in the burrito assembly line at their local Chipotle. So quick! So efficient! Why, they wondered, couldn’t there be a Chipotle of pizzas? Once your pizza is assembled—the workers behind the counter apply toppings with care and parsimony so that once the pizza’s cut, there will be a single piece of sausage on every slice—it goes into a “blazing-hot oven” (temperature unspecified) for 180 seconds....

Romain Duris and Audrey Tatou in Mood Indigo The most direct precedent for Gondry’s film might be David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch, which responds with comparable imagination to the challenge of adapting an unfilmable novel. Both are highly personal works that filter the author’s biography and literary style through the director’s unique aesthetic. Mood Indigo is as much about Vian’s Parisian adventures of the 1930s as it is about Gondry’s nostalgia for a time and place that he didn’t experience directly....

Rod Stewart is a buffoon and a lech who’s spent nearly 40 years proudly embarrassing himself onstage and on numerous musical projects (the cover of his Christmas album, Merry Christmas, Baby, conveys about as much yuletide cheer as a holiday sweater sprayed with Drakkar Noir). But I still hold out hope that the Stewart of the 1960s and ’70s—the guy who fronted the Jeff Beck Group and the Faces and who cut an incredible run of Stonesy folk-blues LPs, the apex of which is 1971’s Every Picture Tells a Story—might return to his earthy, gently rambunctious roots....

Slothrust would be a great doomy sludge-metal band name: with each utterance of it you can practically hear slow-grinding feedback and monster power chords being crushed beneath toppling rhythms. That doesn’t quite describe the actual Slothrust, though. The trio does have a heavy grunge snarl a la Mudhoney or Soundgarden, but it’s leavened by Leah Wellbaum’s winsome vocals and the indie-rock song structures lurking under the murk. Their second album, Everyone Else (Dangerbird), released last October, is a fuzzed-out slab of classic and alternative rock—half swagger, half stagger....

Anyone aware of Kathleen Rooney’s controversial exit in 2010 from Senator Dick Durbin’s Chicago office might be disappointed that her new political book isn’t a tell-all. An accomplished writer with several books under her belt—including poetry and a memoir, Live Nude Girl, about being an artist’s model—Rooney published her first work, the autobiographical essay collection For You, for You, I Am Trilling These Songs, while working as a Durbin aide. When word of the book got back to the senator’s D....

Ah, yes, the twinkling lights, the tinkling bells, the emails and the phone calls: ’tis the season to be hit up for donations. And hit up again. And again. But let’s say you’re a little more stingy—er, discriminating—than that. One simple way to turn your despicable Scroogyness into rational and therefore acceptable behavior is to apply the handy-dandy executive pay test. And in this brave new shame-free Trumpian world, it seems no one’s embarrassed about taking a one-percenter salary out of donations wangled from the less fortunate....

Ronald Martinez/Getty Images North America The Thunder’s Reggie Jackson and the Clippers’ Matt Barnes Is justice procedural, or is it defined strictly by the results? If an innocent man is mistakenly convicted of murder after a fair trial, has justice been done? Many an appellate judge will say it has. Form was followed, and what more can be asked of any fallible institution? The announcers were saying, so what? They made sure we understood the rules: the out-of-bounds calls could be reviewed and reversed; the foul noncalls could not....

Jeff Koons is one of the world’s most sought-after artists. “I’ve made what the Beatles would have made if they had made sculpture,” he once declared brazenly. “Nobody ever said that the Beatles’ music was not on a high level, but it appealed to a mass audience. That is what I want to do.” In 2013 his sculpture Balloon Dog (Orange) sold at auction for $58.4 million, the highest price ever paid for a work of art by a living artist....

Two-thirds of this young Alabama trio is made up of veterans of Hog Mountin, an underrated southern-fried swamp-metal outfit that was once a jewel of the Birmingham scene. But on their debut self-released full-length, last year’s Tunguska, Hexxus seem to be on a different trajectory entirely. Still backbreakingly heavy, they prove themselves capable of employing a lighter touch from time to time, with sweet and slightly proggy interludes offering moments in which to take a deep breath before being slammed back down into the extragravity grind....

Aphex TwinSyro (Warp) Vashti BunyanHeartleap (DiCristina) The digital market has disrupted plenty of things about the way music is created, distributed, and even defined. EPs used to be stopgaps between full-lengths, and mixtapes were collections of freestyles and slapdash cuts; these days, though, MCs are releasing album-length EPs and mixtapes as polished as commercial LPs. NehruvianDoom, a collaboration between young New York MC Bishop Nehru and mysterious rapper-producer Doom, feels like an old-world mixtape and an EP at the same time—it’s a tad too short, and the half-baked tracks are cobbled together....

Jeff Cagle Penrose Brewing’s first three year-round beers: Proto Gradus, P-2, and Navette Penrose Brewing of Geneva, Illinois, threw a Chicago launch party last Monday at a lovely Humboldt Park studio space shared by Michael Kiser of Good Beer Hunting. Because that was a week ago, Karl Klockars at Time Out and Chuck Sudo at Chicagoist have beaten me to the punch, and their posts both include a fair amount of the brewery’s backstory....

When Sam Smith opened the Perry Mansion Cultural Center in 2010, his preeminent goal was to reclaim and reshape the narrative of black life in America. “You build bridges by having the ability to control your image and your story, and [black people] don’t get to do that,” Smith says. And with each exhibit, he’s been able to tell this story piece by piece, but its culmination will come in a few years when he’s completed building a slave ship in the basement for an exhibit that will be called “The Slave Experience....

Is that Nocturo Culto of Darkthrone gracing the B Side of the Reader in full black-metal regalia? No, that’s actually little old Lorde—it’s just an issue that’s passed through the hands of local artist Zachary Hart Baker. Since the beginning of the year, Baker has been attacking Reader covers with a black Sharpie, turning them into his own versions of Marduk and Mayhem band photos. He makes the cover subjects up with corpse paint, gives them long, scraggly beards, and outfits them with black leather, chains, and spiked gauntlets....

Bridge of Spies feels like Steven Spielberg’s belated Father’s Day gift to America, a handsome-looking film about history, national values, and other things you can talk about with your dad over a good sandwich. It invites discussion through long, talky scenes about morally ambiguous matters, reminding us that certain things require care and reason and can’t be settled right away. The film ends in the early 1960s on an unresolved note—the conflicts of the story may have been settled, but the Cold War rages on—and this is Spielberg’s way of encouraging viewers to continue the conversations raised by the film after they leave the theater....

Ten years ago, local musician Christopher Saathoff, a collaborator with Alex White and member of Chin Up Chin Up, was tragically hit and killed by a drunk driver on Western Avenue while leaving the Empty Bottle, and tonight that same club is hosting a celebration of his life and legacy. The show, headlined by a solo set from White, is a benefit for the Christopher Saathoff Foundation, a charitable organization opened up in his name to help children in need across the world....

A couple weeks ago Battles released the album artwork for their forthcoming album, La Di Da Di, which features an array of breakfast food arranged in a diagonal line atop a manilla backdrop. I was tickled by the design when I first saw it, but in that moment I’d somehow forgotten about a recent split cassette that also features a collage of grub fit for a morning meal: Drawing Trees and Ant’lrd’s Balanced Breakfast....