There are plenty of shows, films, and concerts happening this week. Here’s some of what we recommend: Mon 8/27: The Radicalization Process revisits the revolutions of 1960s and ’70s America. It’s part of “68+50,” Illinois Humanities’ commemoration of the 1968 Democratic National Convention. 7:30 PM, Co-Prosperity Sphere, 3219 S. Morgan, 312-422-5580, ilhumanities.org/​program/​6850, $10. Tue 8/28: Heartbreak Hotel takes us back to Elvis’s early, prejumpsuit years, and all the classic hits you know and love!...

Brian Jackson / Sun-Times Media Mayor Rahm Emanuel, with police Superintendent Garry McCarthy at his side, wants to lighten up on low-level drug offenders in exchange for a crackdown on those who violate gun laws. To follow the logic of Mayor Emanuel’s latest proposal for reforming marijuana laws, you’d think that only black people smoke pot, and poor black people at that. This is the sad hypocrisy of our marijuana laws as exposed by yours truly and Mick Dumke more than three years ago....

Leor Galil,Reader staff writer Mrs. Carol Edwards, “(Whoa! Whoa!) Bussin’s Got to Go” seven-inch I often buy records that are a total mystery to me, and this country seven-inch fits the bill—even after taking it home, I’ve barely been able to scare up any information about it. If my research is to be trusted, it was made in Miami in the 70s, when the area’s schools were subject to desegregation busing....

Cendrillon, Jules Massenet’s French opera version of “Cinderella,” premiered in Paris in 1899 but is just now making its debut at Lyric Opera. What took so long? Changing taste in opera, with a turn away from frothy fairytales, for sure. But there’s also the fact that Massenet took the Western world’s most iconic story of romantic love—and made Prince Charming a soprano. Now Cendrillon‘s time has come. Lyric’s cast features the wonderful mezzo-soprano Alice Coote as the smitten royal youth: she knows how to manspread and has a voice like a meteor streaking across a night sky....

In this breezy, quasi-feminist 2015 historical comedy, based on the unlikely life of the titular 17th-century folk heroine—who, upon her death at age 37, had gone from prostitute to celebrated actress to favored mistress of King Charles II—British playwright Jessica Swale manages to make a two-and-a-half-hour play feel like a sketch. Her problematic strategy is apparent in the opening minutes, as mouthy Nell, selling oranges in what we’re asked to believe is the theater in which we’re all sitting and where a play has just started, is plucked from the stalls by renowned actor Charles Hart, smitten by her “cheek,” and given a crash course in emotive acting....

Edward and Rebecca were married once, now they’re divorced. He’s seeing a woman named Tina, whom he’s in the process of disenchanting; she’s remarried, to Roger, a foppish English emigre who runs drug tests for pharmaceutical companies and wooed her on a cruise to Nova Scotia. Before they broke up (actually, before they were even married), Edward and Rebecca produced Susannah, aka Sukey, who matured into something of a monster: “She was brutal,” Edward recalls....

Dave Heumann, front man for Baltimore’s long-running Arbouretum, isn’t shy about reaching toward the profound while addressing transformation on the recent Song of the Rose (Thrill Jockey). The elegantly lumbering opening track, “Call Upon the Fire,” announces a need to break free of atrophy and wipe the slate clean, burning something down in order to start over: “Unfolding in the black of night / What’s ruined is restored,” Heumann sings, melding melodic shapes redolent of British folk tradition with a biting hard-rock attack a la Steeleye Span....

The 1934 Pittsburgh Crawfords, including Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige, and Oscar Charleston. Were they the greatest team of all time? Part of the romance of baseball is that there’s been so much room for tall tales to develop. Unlike pro basketball or football, which have always been carefully controlled and monitored by their leagues, pro baseball grew up in a time before film or even action photography, and before careful record-keeping, when the only proof that things actually happened was eyewitness accounts....

Throughout a career spanning four decades, pianist Matthew Shipp has made clear that he understands the value of deepening a musical relationship over time. While he’s played and recorded with a wide variety of fellow improvisers, he returns to certain collaborators over and over. “In some ways I got that stance from David Ware,” says Shipp, 57. He was the tenor saxophonist’s principal pianist from 1989 till his death in 2012, providing a crucial artistic foil—and helping the soulful, powerful David S....

I’ve never been shy about how much I like local rapper ShowYouSuck. I write about him regularly in the Reader, both online and in print. And last month I celebrated my 30th birthday by going to see Show headline Emporium in Wicker Park. I fought fatigue and an oncoming cold to watch him tear up his underattended late-night set (after midnight on a Wednesday isn’t exactly prime party time), and like he always does, he delivered each line as though he had a packed house hanging on his every word....

Forest Whitaker and Liev Schreiber in The Butler It’s been roughly a year since Lee Daniels last snuck into the mainstream with The Butler, his overstuffed pageant of modern African-American history. I was surprised by how few mainstream critics acknowledged what a weird and angry movie it is (though I tried in my essay on the film). Indeed, with a year’s distance from The Butler, the details that most stand out in my memory are those that seem to have been created in explicit defiance of good taste....

Last weekend brought the nationwide opening of The Lego Batman Movie, a computer-animated whizbang that uses the Lego brand’s spark-plug characters and interlocking construction bricks to spoof the Batman/Superman/DC Comics universe. Like many children’s animations, the movie is a pinball machine of gags, wisecracks, and knowing pop-culture references, designed to feed the attention deficit disorder of kids and adults alike. Everything is foregrounded, everything is in your face, and your eyes dart around in the darkness of the theater like a caged bird....

Do you realize the University of Illinois might be this close to a national basketball championship? “Amid the blue-and-white pompoms,” wrote Powell, “few are so rude as to mention that [UNC] remains enmeshed in a scandal of spectacular proportions. Put simply, for two decades until 2013, the university provided fake classes for many hundreds of student athletes, most of them basketball and football players.” Imagine if UNC is stripped of all championships tainted by corruption!...

There’s just something about a noise-rock record from Minneapolis, like a bowl of gumbo from Baton Rouge. Forged among the pillars of the almighty Amphetamine Reptile imprint—and no doubt guided by a trail of dismembered Big Muff pedals—Buildings churn through noise rock loyal to their Twin Cities and North Dakota forefathers (Hammerhead, Godheadsilo, etc). The too-underappreciated trio’s newest, You Are Not One of Us (Gilead Media), stays the noise-rock course, anchored by a rhythm section that swoops and strikes down like a wrecking ball and pile driver working in tandem....

In a thoughtful A.V. Club retrospective of early 2000s dance-punk, Reader associate editor Kevin Warwick traced the genre’s flash on the dance floor via the era’s seminal records. “Flash” is an apt word, too—before the aughts came to a close, many of the best practitioners either called it a day (Q and Not U, Death From Above 1979), lost the thread (Hot Hot Heat), or became cheeseballs (Killers). Of the groups still truckin’, none have soldiered on like Brooklyn outfit !...

For a short time at least, no one is going to talk about Daisies without talking about Analogue. At Daisies Frillman’s offering eight pasta dishes, nine, really, if you count a pasta salad appetizer. I’m interested in knowing who would go for a pasta salad starter and then follow it with something like mushroom ragu pappardelle or whole wheat tagliatelle with walnuts and fava bean pesto. I’ve never met anyone like that....

Peter Coffin David Grubbs A couple of months ago I interviewed former Chicagoan David Grubbs about his excellent book Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording (Duke University Press), a highly readable and illuminating examination of the role sound recordings play in the dissemination of experimental music. In the book he writes about how important recordings have been an educational and aesthetic tool, a medium that brought him into contact not only with work made decades before he was born, but also music that was rarely if ever performed in Louisville, Kentucky, where he grew up....

9 Muses of Star Empire In reviewing titles for the upcoming Chicago International Music and Movies Festival, I recently watched the documentary 9 Muses of Star Empire, a behind-the-scenes look at a Korean girl group called the 9 Muses. (It screens on the afternoon of Sunday, May 4, at the Logan Theatre.) The movie acknowledges up front that the group (and many others like it) are handled essentially like commodities, with managers and studio executives determining how these young women look, how they interact with others, and even how they spend their free time....

Leor Galil, Reader staff writer Karin Pritikin and Kent Barker, The King & I: A Little Gallery of Elvis Impersonators True story: As a kid I was so obsessed with the King that for a short time I asked everyone to call me Elvis. This coffee-table book documents the first annual convention of the Elvis Presley Impersonators Association of America, which took place in Chicago in 1989. Pritikin thoughtfully weaves together her subjects’ backstories, and Barker’s tender portraits of the impersonators in costume capture the joy and passion of people who have dedicated their lives to making sure the public stays under Elvis’s spell....

Kevin Tanaka/Sun-Times Media CPS speech therapist Maria Moreno supporting the teachers’ boycott of ISAT tests outside of Saucedo Scholastic Academy In my role as the guy on staff who has to do the really boring stuff, I’ve spent the better part of the day reading the Illinois school code. First, a word or two about the state’s school code. It’s long, boring, and horribly written. Over the last few weeks a growing movement of public school parents have asked CPS leaders: Why should my child have to take the ISAT if you’re phasing it out and it has nothing to do with high school or college admissions?...