Whether you call them fireworks, sky candy, rocket dust, rainbow suspenders, dragon ball-see, or BOOM, you’ll get a great view (and ribs) at these all-American Fourth of July parties. Evanston Fourth of July Twilight Concert and Fireworks The Palatine Concert Band plays from 7:30 to 9 PM before accompanying an impressive fireworks display, launched from Clark Street Beach, that should be viewable from east of downtown Evanston. Tue 7/4, 7:30 PM; fireworks start at 9:30 PM, Centennial Park, Sheridan and Church, Evanston, free....

When the artist Jason Lazarus started “Too Hard to Keep,” a photo project he’s come to think of as more of an archive, he was the sort of person who had photographs in his collection that really were too hard for him to look at. If he felt that way, he reasoned, there must be other people who felt the same. So he invited them to send him their own painful photos through the mail or e-mail or, as time went on and technology evolved, their phones....

On her remarkable new album Party (4AD), New Zealand singer-songwriter Aldous Harding manages to further strip down an already minimal sound while dramatically extending her range. There are a few songs on the new album—magnificently and resourcefully produced by frequent PJ Harvey collaborator John Parish—where the diaphanous, eerie folk of her striking eponymous debut remains, but on most of it she uses her voice to create a dazzling variety of musical personas, cumulatively offering a richness and depth I didn’t expect even given how much I loved her first album....

The result, though occasionally funny, is a genuine display of ugliness on both sides, and everyone involved spends the play alternating between exuberance and contrition over how far off the deep end they’re prepared to go for these two feet of dirt. Turning a suburban squabble over a property line into high art is for Zacarias a matter of making the land stand for something. By the end, the Butleys have become the frantic and unwitting imperialists who stole valuable property from the rightfully entitled if vaguely sharklike Del Valles....

On Monday, Mayor Rahm Emanuel sat down with graduate students at Stanford University’s business school to tell them what a wonderful job he’s doing in Chicago—as though his experiences would help them achieve their entrepreneurial dreams. In reality, CPS is hopelessly broke and Rahm has no clue how to fix the problem. That part of the talk has gathered all the notoriety. But it’s only a small portion of an one-hour talk....

The 1966 paella western The Texican starred Audie Murphy as a former Texas lawman on the lam in Mexico who rides back across the border to avenge his newspaperman brother’s death at the hands of the town’s crooked political boss, Luke Starr, played by a well-lubricated Broderick Crawford. Murphy’s character, Jess Garlin, who up until then was living easy with his Mexican girlfriend, is a good stand-in for the weird border cuisine that developed over the centuries among Tejanos, pre-Republican Texans of Spanish or Mexican descent....

Is experiencing music outdoors worthwhile if you can’t share it with those you love? Not to those guiding the Chosen Few Picnic, which began the way many great summertime activities should start—with a family barbecue. The original five members of south-side DJ collective the Chosen Few, who helped build the foundation for house music as teenagers in the late 70s, weren’t all living in Chicago by the late 80s, but they were in town together for certain holidays....

The Internet emerged out of the Odd Future collective in 2011, and with their R&B sound and charisma, they’ve effectively stood out among more than a dozen projects associated with the volatile hip-hop group. Much of the credit for their recent evolution goes to songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer Steve Lacy, who joined the Internet as a guitarist and vocalist in 2013, when they began working on Ego Death (which came out in 2015), bringing a refined ingenuity as co-executive producer....

Getty Images As The Trials of Muhammad Ali makes clear, Ali remains an inspiration all these years later. In need of a break from the utter madness of politics in Chicago, I went to see The Trials of Muhammad Ali, Bill Siegel’s brilliant documentary, which should have been nominated for an Academy Award but wasn’t. I saw it over the weekend at the Cultural Center. By chance, it’s playing tonight at the ShowPlace Icon (150 W....

Many of my Reader coworkers know that I have a somewhat amusing, mostly annoying habit of requesting that all our covers should take the form of Mad magazine fold-in covers. When I propose this in editorial staff meetings, it is under the assumption that it will never happen. Well, dreams do come true. This year, local genius Jason Frederick made his annual Pitchfork Music Festival B Side cover a Mad magazine-style fold-in....

Spies, Traitors, and Saboteurs: Fear and Freedom in America,” now up at the Chicago History Museum, is an exhibit with a provocative subject that’s hobbled by poor presentation. For example, a massive time line—inexplicably mounted on wavelike plastic bas-relief rather than a flat wall—takes up the long hallway at the entrance and immediately confuses the viewer. Walking back and forth along its span, it’s possible to trace the events chronicled in each of the exhibition’s sections, yet much more difficult to discern connections between them....

Q: I’m newly divorced and have started a relationship with a man I’ve known and deeply cared about for decades. The sex is amazing—from start to finish, I feel better than I ever did even in the best moments with my ex. And in the most intense moments? He makes me see stars. He is a very generous lover—he turns me on like crazy, and I regularly come while sexting with him....

ZIGA KORITNIK Ches Smith I spent last weekend in New York, where I attended the annual Winter Jazz Festival for the first time. The two-night extravaganza is a mind-melting showcase of contemporary iterations of jazz and improvised music—most of it made in New York—organized by Brice Rosenbloom and Adam Schatz. Having attended South by Southwest for many years, I thought I would be prepared for facing six or seven acts spread out across nine stages, all of them tightly clustered in the heart of Greenwich Village....

If a movie review falls in the online forest, does anyone hear it? That’s the question I’ve been asking myself about my piece on Batkid Begins, which we yanked from the print edition after learning that the movie would close on Thursday. Also this week, Ben Sachs considers the inefficacy of using celebrities to provide the voices of animated characters. Case in point: Minions, the latest in the Despicable Me series....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Tuesday, March 7, 2017. Local immigration activists: Trump’s modified travel ban is still unacceptable President Donald Trump introduced a modified travel and immigration ban that bars immigrants and visitors from six of the seven predominantly Muslim countries that the original policy named. The law will go into effect March 16 and last for 90 days. Citizens from Sudan, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen who didn’t have a U....

This year marks the 75th anniversary of Batman’s first appearance, in Detective Comics No. 27, and it seems, therefore, like a good time to reveal a villainous and dastardly secret: those first Batman comics were unbelievably wretched. Early Superman stories have a vindictive socialist charge as Siegel and Shuster gleefully have their high-jumping hero bash greedy capitalist pigs; early Wonder Woman comics are a delirious mix of bondage, feminism, and giant space kangaroos....

On Anatomy of a Sellout (Logan Hardware) Dark Fog run their glowing nuggets of psych through a rock tumbler, retaining the genre’s impenetrable mystique while polishing away much of the indulgent noodling that many contemporary psych bands seem to think is a foundational element. Not that there isn’t any freaked-out wailing—there’s plenty. But Dark Fog know how to play with purpose, and on the record it pays off in something resembling cohesion....

Your hands are tied with Fiddler. Everyone who comes to see it will want their yeidel-deidel needs met in a number of ways. The costumes, especially the women’s, have to be pure threadbare shtetl-wear. The sets need to evoke a Chagall-like vision of mystical poverty in which everything is both grubby and luminous, in which the glow of ancestral origins beams through a thickly clouded dust, the hunger from whence Jews came....

On Halloween night 2016, a truck pushing 50 miles an hour rammed into the tour van of Saint Louis emo upstarts Foxing. The band members were fine, but their vehicle was totaled. Among the many people who offered their support to the band following the crash was former Death Cab for Cutie guitarist Chris Walla; he mixed the cover of Dido’s “White Flag” that Foxing recorded and released to raise money to cover the vehicle damages....

Isa Mazzei, a former camgirl, was tired of films that depicted sex workers as disposable and unworthy of empathy. So she teamed up with director Daniel Goldhaber and modern horror juggernaut Blumhouse Productions to create Cam—a film that manages to be both a vibrant techno thriller that champions its sex-worker protagonist and an examination of the real-world consequences of doing sex work in a whorephobic society. While Lola Two is framed as Alice’s nemesis, she is far from the film’s villain....