Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Monday, April 3, 2017. A mother and son were shot to death almost exactly one year apart Dejenaba Altman was shot and killed March 31, 2016, after being caught in crossfire in West Garfield Park. Her son, Romille McCall, died March 30, 2017, from injuries sustained in a shooting in Austin, according to the Tribune. “I feel very numb. I don’t know what to feel or what to believe in,” Altman’s daughter and McCall’s sister, Tyshawnda McCall, told the newspaper....

While in New York in January I caught a performance by Stockholm-based sound artist John Chantler, who hunkered down behind a small table outfitted with two small analog synthesizers and a computer. The set began with pinging electronic sounds that flickered about, then gained in density, volume, and physicality as the minutes passed, eventually transforming from a pleasant ambient splatter of electronic starbursts into a punishing din that toggled between assaultive and enveloping....

Our text today, sisters and brothers, is from Genesis 4: the story of humanity’s first murder. Adam and Eve’s elder son, Cain, was a farmer and their younger one, Abel, a shepherd. Both brought offerings to God, but when He rejected Cain’s offering, Cain became angry. Unable to kill God, he killed Abel instead. Needless to say, Adam isn’t the same after that. In his despondency he lets both the farm and his boys grow wild....

Visitors I’m glad to have seen Godfrey Reggio’s feature-length montage Visitors on a big screen (it’s currently playing at the Landmark Century Centre), even though I didn’t particularly care for the movie on the whole. Jonathan Rosenbaum’s critique of Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi seems equally applicable here (“This quasi-mystical documentary is largely a dull rehash of ideas given infinitely better realization in Vertov’s The Man With the Movie Camera and many other experimental films of the 20s”), as does Fred Camper’s assessment of Baraka, a like-minded project by Reggio’s former collaborator Ron Fricke (“With a few exceptions ....

If you have fellow foodies in your Facebook feed, you’ve likely seen this Washington Post piece by Lavanya Ramanathan, “Why everyone should stop calling immigrant food ‘ethnic.'” It’s not an unreasonable issue to raise: Why are some foods are “ethnic” and others aren’t even though, obviously, everything American from pizza to wieners was specific to an immigrant ethnicity at some point (which was almost certainly well after the first bad English cook arrived at Jamestown)?...

Rick Bayless/Facebook Rick Bayless in the rooftop garden above Topolobampo and Frontera Grill on Clark Street. Three decades ago fine dining in Chicago happened at places with names like Maxim’s, Le Perroquet, and Chez Paul. Then the 1980s saw three restaurants open and refine other national cuisines besides French—Spiaggia for Italian food in 1984, Charlie Trotter’s for American cuisine in 1987, and, most surprisingly, Rick Bayless’s Topolobampo for Mexican, a cuisine then inextricably associated with cheap eats and big strong drinks, in 1989....

Vietnam Romance: Entertainment System In some of the shorts that screened last month at the Nightingale, filmmaker Harun Farocki considered how we might analyze the many types of noncinematic moving images—such as surveillance footage and video game landscapes—that have become all but inescapable in 21st-century life. This issue will likely come into play tomorrow night at the Film Studies Center at University of Chicago, when artist and game designer Eddo Stern will lecture on his work and present some recent projects developed at the UCLA Game Lab....

In December 1907, the U.S. Post Office gave John M. Hubbard, the assistant postmaster of Chicago, the job of reading the city’s letters addressed to Santa Claus. Hubbard was to match children who appeared to be in need with charitable organizations and generous individuals. “I suppose because I’m a fat, good-natured fellow I get all the extra work,” Hubbard joked with one reporter during his first week as Kris Kringle....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Monday, May 1, 2017. There’s no picture of Richard M. Daley on City Hall’s wall of mayors Former mayor Richard M. Daley, the city’s longest-serving mayor, is missing from the wall of mayors in City Hall. His picture has still not been hung on the wall of the fifth-floor mayor’s office reception area along with the other former Chicago mayors. There’s even a picture of Cook County clerk David Orr, who was mayor for eight days in the 1980s....

With The Wind Rises, animator Hayao Miyazaki paints an empathetic portrait of Jiro Horikoshi, the aeronautical engineer who designed many of the fighter planes used by the Japanese military during World War II. The film is one of the most rapturously beautiful that Miyazaki has made, and all the more unsettling because of it. Miyazaki, who previously told this story in a 2009 manga, claims he didn’t want to judge his subject, though Horikoshi was indirectly responsible for countless deaths....

Little Village is a port of entry for Mexican immigrants, and the neighborhood’s roughly two-mile 26th Street corridor from Sacramento to Kostner is crammed with around 500 local businesses that cater to their tastes: butcher shops, pharmacies, and more than 100 restaurants offering everything from mangonadas—fresh sliced mango spiked with chile and lime and drizzled with savory tamarind sauce—to toddler-size mariachi suits and live doves. Cremeria La Ordeña (3234 W. 26th) has a bulk section to rival any Whole Foods, with an array of chile-lime snacks (pepitas, white beans, chickpeas, and peanuts) and a deli case full of fresh cheeses, sticky-sweet cajeta (goat’s milk caramel), and a dozen different kinds of fresh mole....

courtesy of Trouble in Mind Records Klaus Johann Grobe I don’t hang out in record shops as much as I used to, a state of affairs my wallet doesn’t mind. But the flip side of that absence is that I don’t as often have the sort of epiphanies I did a few months ago while in Permanent Records. I heard something playing on the sound system I didn’t know, and after a couple of songs the music had seduced me enough to ask the man behind the counter, Bill Roe, what was playing....

You can hear almost all of African-American history in the music of the Staple Singers: slave-era folk songs and hymns; the Delta blues, considered the “devil’s music” by the hymn singers; gospel from the northern churches that formed the backbone of black social life after the Great Migration; and protest songs from the civil rights movement. I’ll Take You There,Greg Kot’s new biography of the Staples (family and singers), is at its best when it shows how they lived that history....

As a counterpoint to the last four years of school cuts, closings, testing, and privatization, I urge you to watch a recent speech—which you can find here—by Elizabeth Heurtefeu, a former public school principal. In 2007—again on a whim—she applied for the job as LaSalle’s principal. “We received an e-mail on the Fourth of July from the CEO telling us that [in a few days] we had to report for mandatory five-day training,” Heurtefeu says....

Along with other Democrats throughout the area, I recently got my marching orders for the November elections. Let’s start with the flyer’s featured photo. It’s of Toni Preckwinkle, president of the Cook County Board of Commissioners. That’s the same Toni Preckwinkle who decided not to challenge Rahm Emanuel for mayor, even though she commanded a 20-something point lead in the polls. Like other Chicago voters, I don’t ask for much....

Black Breath are currently one of the best bands in the genre of hateful, atheistic music. A mix of D-beat rhythms and filthy metal riffs, the Seattle-based fivesome have released a pair of blistering full-lengths during their short history together (2010’s Heavy Breathing and 2012’s Sentenced to Life), and they’ve been prepping the new Kurt Ballou-produced assault for a while—the leg surgery drummer Jamie Byrum had to undergo when he was hit by a car last year likely didn’t help in expediting the album....

JumpStock/Photos.com The Internet remembers everything. Many years ago—I’m being gallantly vague about how many—a young writer broke into journalism in the worst possible way. One of America’s largest newspapers published a story she’d submitted about her exciting adventure in a far-away land. Unfortunately, the story wasn’t true. Nothing of the sort had happened to her—it had happened to someone else and she’d written it up in the first person because it was a lot more exciting that way....

Thanks to the subversive power of YouTube, you can now watch New Trier: Tip of the Spear—the documentary the North Shore radical right tried to shut down—on your computer. Director and narrator Paul Traynor gallops deep into the weeds in his hurriedly produced, rapid-fire account of how a battle over Seminar Day, a one-day program on racial civil rights at elite New Trier High School, opened a window on what he sees as a national conspiracy to destroy public schools and take control of local government....

Savannah-based swamp-metal band Black Tusk took a terrible hit in 2014, when their bassist and cofounder, Jonathan Athon, passed away following a motorcycle crash. Prior to the accident, the trio had largely finished recording their fifth album, Pillars of Ash, and with Athon’s lines already laid down, his bandmates were able to complete the process for a release on Relapse in 2016. That makes the new T.C.B.T. (for “Taking Care of Black Tusk”) the group’s first full-length without Athon, but Corey Barhorst, best known as the longtime bassist of Black Tusk’s friends and neighbors Kylesa, steps up admirably; bass is crucial to the band’s sludgy sound, even more so when they pick up the pace with speed and aggression informed by their hardcore roots....

Pianist, bandleader, and composer Jason Moran is in town tonight, bringing an ambitious new project to Symphony Center. He’s developed a practice of saluting key influences in a fashion that eschews predictable tributes: his celebration of the great Fats Waller turned the subject’s music upside down with infusions of hip-hop and R&B, while his project built around the famous 1959 Town Hall concert by pianist Thelonious Monk is enhanced with audio recordings, photographs, and videos inspired by contemporaneous work done by photographer Eugene Smith at a New York loft space....