The paint has barely dried on the joint LP local guitarists Ryley Walker and Bill Mac­Kay put out in August, but on Friday, October 16, Mac­Kay’s folky art-rock quartet Darts & Arrows releases the full-length Altamira on Bandcamp (and as a small-run CD). In 2010, the Reader‘s Peter Margasak wrote that “the group’s abundantly inventive music flows . . . with a delicate rhythmic touch,” and the gentle melodies of the new album’s “Evergreen” call to mind verdant, rolling hills....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Monday, February 13, 2017. Cop who shot Quintonio LeGrier, Bettie Jones won’t be charged in their deaths Chicago police officer Robert Rialmo won’t face criminal charges for the shooting deaths of 19-year-old Quintonio LeGrier and 55-year-old Bettie Jones just after Christmas Day 2015. Cook County prosecutors issued a statement saying that “it could not be proved beyond a reasonable doubt that the officer didn’t believe he or his partner were in ‘imminent danger’ of great bodily harm from LeGrier,” who was holding a baseball bat, according to the Tribune....

On May 31 local rapper Kweku Collins was one of more than 700 teenagers graduating from Evanston Township High School. While most of his classmates had summer to look forward to before going off to college in the fall, Collins was jumping straight into his professional life. At the beginning of April the rapper publicly announced he signed a deal with Chicago indie hip-hop label Closed Sessions, which began seeding the Internet with lushly produced cuts from Collins....

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. That’s correct: I’m praising the mayor. As far as I’m concerned it was the high point of his administration. Ho, ho, ho....

The Talent Fest cover A couple weeks ago Playboy became the latest national media outlet to cover Chicago hip-hop with an in-depth story, though like the recent “docs” from World Star and Noisey the feature is mostly focused on the drill scene. Fortunately writer Ethan Brown does take a moment to point out that this city’s rap scene isn’t just Chief Keef and his circle: I don’t remember exactly, except I just really loved hip-hop....

If you attempt to summarize a Rebecca Gilman play for someone who’s not already familiar with her work, you run the risk of sounding like you’re describing an after-school special or, possibly, an episode of Law and Order. A Gilman play usually features a group of strong-minded characters caught up in situations beyond their control, leading to serious moral dilemmas. So far her characters have dealt with racism (Spinning Into Butter), stalking (Boy Gets Girl), prostitution (Blue Surge), materialism and debt (Dollhouse), midcareer malaise (The Sweetest Swing in Baseball), and whether to have children (The Crowd You’re in With)....

Few songwriters are able to revisit their past with as much poetic effectiveness as Rodney Crowell, a roots master who regularly reflects on his early days—whether growing up in Texas or arriving in Nashville as a songwriting greenhorn. He does it again on the terrific new album Close Ties (New West), his first new effort in three years and one that stands as tall as anything he’s done. Crowell’s rarely sounded more pensive....

Critics have compared Silence, Martin Scorsese’s latest drama, to his spiritually inclined The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) and Kundun (1997). But another way of approaching Silence is in relation to Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street (2014). A cartoonish black comedy about real-life Wall Street swindler Jordan Belfort, Wolf amplified Scorsese’s filmmaking to the point of self-parody, especially with regard to the movie’s subjects: foulmouthed, macho lowlifes who tease each other, do drugs, treat women like garbage, and commit wanton acts of violence (in this case, financial)....

Ten years ago Phil Kadner gave a young colleague a piece of advice. Linda Lutton, then a reporter for the Daily Southtown, had the goods on a suburban school official who’d been stealing thousands of dollars from his district. Lutton was feeling triumphant—maybe even a little too excited for her own good. Kadner, the Southtown’s veteran news columnist, set her straight. A shelter for battered women in Palos Hills wanted to expand, but the neighbors wouldn’t have it....

Multi-instrumentalist Nate Garrett has been upfront in interviews about his struggles with alcoholism that underlie the painful, personal cry from the void that is the 2016 debut of Spirit Adrift, Chained to Oblivion. In those days, Spirit Adrift was a one-man band; Garrett meticulously created its heavy, bludgeoning sound layer by layer, summoning a haunting roar that sounds like it comes from a solitary monster who’s the last of his kind....

On the morning of inauguration day, I awoke to a cold, gloomy, lightly falling rain, and an alarming New York Times story concerning the man who would, in a matter of hours, become the 45th president of the United States. “The continuing counterintelligence investigation means that Mr. Trump will take the oath of office on Friday with his associates under investigation and after the intelligence agencies concluded that the Russian government had worked to help elect him....

When dancer-choreographers Liz Burritt, Kristina Fluty, and Rebecca Salzer waded into the vast pool of Vivian Maier’s photographs, the pictures that held their attention were of women caught off guard, surprised yet staring defiantly into the lens. Inspired by these photos and the pejorative nickname neighborhood teens gave Maier thanks to her gawky gait, the dancers began to reinterpret Maier’s own image as an eccentric spinster as an allegory for the awkwardness of being seen publicly as a woman....

We’ve often been told in these heady days of the Internet that we don’t need radio stations, record labels, or, cough cough, music critics, because listeners have easy access to music and no longer require gatekeepers. I’m a music critic and I still rely on such gatekeepers myself—without any sort of filter or direction I’d be wasting an awful lot of time slogging through the torrent of music that’s sitting out there on the web, waiting for discovery....

The first two minutes of today’s 12 O’Clock Track, “What’s Holding You?,” are held together pretty well. The vocals and guitar of Lorena Quintanilla (Lorelle) melt over the rhythms laid down by Alberto Gonzales (the Obsolete). Reverb is not in short supply, but the Mexican duo keeps a handle on it—again, for the first couple of minutes. Following that, a space-age guitar lead lets loose, panning from one speaker to the next and sounding like it’s trying to saw its way out, as the drums, warm bass line, and various other percussion kick on repeat....

Boy howdy did it get exciting ’round these parts last week! Our Public Newsroom with City Bureau kicked off last Thursday with a toast in our new Bronzeville office—which then led to some of the smartest discussions I’ve had in this city about how we can hold public office-seekers publicly accountable. I don’t mean “we” the press, the royal/generic we that might allow me to pass off platitudes about what should be done, in general, without ever really doing them....

Chandler West/Sun-Times Media One wonders just how far Mayor Rahm will go with his ISAT investigations. For the past few days I’ve been talking to teachers from Drummond and Saucedo schools about the ongoing central-office ISATgate investigation. For teachers, here’s the choice: if you want to save your hide, throw a colleague to the wolves. Looks like these investigators learned a trick or two from Senator Joe McCarthy. Weingarten rights come from a U....

Michael Gebert Eric Stiegman at Moody Tongue Brewing Co. On Monday I wrote about Jared Rouben’s Moody Tongue Brewing Company, and Rouben’s concept of “culinary brewing,” making beers using the kind of farmers market ingredients we associate with farm-to-table restaurants more than breweries. At Rouben’s event last Saturday, I met a farmer named Eric Stiegman, whose barley and hops will go into some of Rouben’s beers. Eric Stiegman: Our farm’s a 700-acre corn and soybean farm, it’s a family farm....

AP Photo/The Southern, Steve Matzker Bruce Rauner is a tough guy to defend. As part of his resolution to show pity on me in the coming year, CAN TV host Ken Davis invited me to appear on his show, thus getting me out of my home where, stricken with the flu, I had remained hidden in isolation for over a week. My greatest challenge came when I offered to defend Bruce Rauner’s ever-shifting position on the minimum wage....

Riot Fest organizers went big for the punk spectacular’s tenth anniversary—more than 100 bands performed on seven stages, and ten of them played classic albums in their entirety—but no amount of planning could’ve stopped Friday’s inclement weather from, um, raining on all the fun. The muddy Humboldt Park fields threatened to suck attendees’ shoes off, but plenty of performers made it easy to forget about the fest’s awkward layout, strange smells, and the Pizza Underground....

I understand why there are so few film adaptations of Haruki Murakami’s fiction. His novels and stories are inherently literary—their most important developments tend to take place in the protagonists’ thoughts, while the narrative turns tend to emerge from outside of the characters’ agency. His protagonists are generally passive; they don’t drive the narratives, but rather things happen to them. By employing these strategies, Murakami conveys how bewildering and overwhelming contemporary life can be, suggesting that our lives, however deliberately we plan them, are ultimately governed by forces beyond our control....