He describes a moment in his kitchen several months after the ordeal had ended when his mother was unpacking groceries. He recalls reaching over while her back was turned and pocketing a plastic bag before he realized what he was doing. He was in the kitchen in his childhood home with his mom—the safest place in the world for him—and he was stealing a plastic bag from her in case he was forced at gunpoint to march in the rain and needed a way to keep his underpants dry....

Take a choppy rhythm, sustain it past the point of comfort, and, if you must put something on top, keep it simple. If the Velvet Underground, the Monks, Neu!, and the Fall haven’t already proved the merits of this strategy to you, Gong Gong Gong are ready to give you one more chance to grasp the facts. The Beijing-based duo have further reduced this method to the bare essentials: guitarist Tom Ng strums on each rhythm chord so persistently that you wonder if he thinks he has to pay a toll each time he adds a new one....

2130 N. Milwaukee 773-888-2453 bikelanechicago.com Runner-Up Kozy’s Cyclery Megastore

notesandbolts.net Runner-Up CHIRP

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Wednesday, April 19, 2017. Chicago Public Schools still could close for the summer 20 days early Chicago Public Schools is still in danger of being forced to close June 1, 20 days early, unless officials find a way to get more funding soon. Alderman George Cardenas proposed legislation that would use city tax increment financing funds to keep the schools open until the scheduled end of the school year (something the Reader‘s Ben Joravsky has also proposed) but alderman Ed Burke said it had “not been properly drafted to pass a legal test and would have to be reconsidered by the City Council’s Finance Committee,” according to DNAinfo Chicago....

Michael Gebert Leghorn Chicken, the long-awaited chicken sandwich stand from chef Jared Van Camp and the others at Element Collective (Nellcôte, Kinmont, etc), opened at 11 AM at 959 N. Western yesterday, and closed less than two hours later, all 600 of the chicken parts prepared for its sandwiches gone. Under normal circumstances 600 would be a very ambitious number for a sandwich shop on opening day, so I wouldn’t say that I think selling out was exactly part of the plan—but I doubt anybody really minded it either....

Because John Corbett and Jim Dempsey stay busy running one of the most respected art galleries in the U.S., the good works of their Corbett vs. Dempsey record label rarely get the attention they deserve. But their scrappy little operation, which carries on the invaluable work Corbett started in 2000 with the Unheard Music Series imprint of Atavistic Records, provides a wonderful service—particularly in making some of the most electric, exciting, and overlooked sounds in the history of improvised music available to new audiences....

For quite a few years I’ve been going against the grain when it comes to Devendra Banhart. As he’s curbed the quirky excesses that helped enamor press and fans alike—the overwrought falsetto, the nonstop hippie affectations, the self-indulgent lyrics emphasizing rejection of social mores—I’ve appreciated his work more. He hasn’t become normal, exactly, but the handful of records he’s made over the last decade or so have focused more on songcraft and atmosphere than attitude....

Jay Farrar titled the first new Son Volt studio album in four years Notes of Blue (Thirty Tigers), and he’s explained that the record was inspired by the spirit of the blues, with certain songs employing tunings used by the likes of Skip James and Mississippi Fred McDowell. But it only takes a few seconds of the opening track, “Promise the World,” with its oozing pedal-steel washes from Jason Kardong undergirding Farrar’s plaintive moan, to hear that Son Volt haven’t changed direction....

Daniel Kyri Madison @danielkyri Runner-Up Greg Matthew Anderson

7/19: The votes are in and have been counted, and the neighbors have gone in favor of Haymarket. See the update at the end of this post. Per the city code, a notice was sent out to all neighborhood residents living within 250 feet of the property on Buena to alert them about the permit, and a meeting was scheduled for June 14 for neighbors to ask questions and raise concerns....

Three years ago wildly imaginative producer and MC Residente (aka René Pérez) disbanded Calle 13, the shape-shifting hip-hop and reggaeton project he started with his stepbrother Eduardo José Cabra Martínez (aka Visitante) in 2004 in their native Puerto Rico. That project catapulted the duo to global fame, and it gave Residente the resources to pursue his vision for self-titled 2017 solo debut—a musical investigation of his ethnic roots inspired and fueled by the results of a DNA test....

Library of Congress David Brooks says that laws shape our culture. Read . . . Discuss . . . Which is why, I guess, governments subsidize parks and museums, and tax booze and cigarettes.

The members of Minneapolis hip-hop collective Doomtree appear to have a soft spot for Chicagoans. In June, their label (also called Doomtree) dropped a full-length collaboration between their producer Lazerbeak and veteran Chicago rapper Longshot. In August, Doomtree put out Artería Verité, an album that brings together group member Sims (and his recent go-to producer, Icetep) and futuristic Chicago rap group Air Credits—i.e., Hood Internet producer Steve Reidell and rapper ShowYouSuck)....

There were 16 students in the 2012 graduating class at Stewart Elementary School. I was one of them. I remember graduation day vividly. We were holed up in room 107, adjacent to the auditorium. We could hear the sound of feet shuffling and our loved ones exchanging pleasantries over our own nervous conversation. We filed out of the room in two lines, one of boys in red gowns, the other of girls in white, in order from shortest to tallest....

Rich Hein/Sun-Times Media Judge Richard Posner in 2003 The difference between law and sausage is that it doesn’t pay to look too closely at how either’s made but sausage is edible. Your average American—not to mention your average judge, especially during confirmation hearings—would say that “the judge’s job is to keep faith with enacted statutes and the Constitution and also with whatever precedents have been decided,” Waldron writes, “whether he likes them or not, even when his private view is that the measures he is called on to administer are silly or wrong....

Whenever the Spanish artist Jaume Plensa is in Chicago, the first place he stops is the northeast corner of Michigan and Monroe. When he arrives there this week, it will be to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Millennium Park and his famed Crown Fountain—and to attend the openings of a pair of exhibits of his head sculptures in the park and at Richard Gray Gallery. Over the phone from Germany, where two solo shows of his work are being held this summer, Plensa describes the urge to visit Crown Fountain as a sort of impulsive pilgrimage of reassurance....

This Chicago blackened death-metal outfit takes its name from an evil Malay spirit, the vengeful vampiric ghost of either a stillborn baby or a woman who died in childbirth. To embody this nightmarish inspiration, front woman Arelys Jimenez—a horror buff and taxidermy enthusiast—dons terrifying, gruesome makeup and props for the band’s performances. In 2016, Matianak dropped a solid two-song EP, Enochian Ritual, and this May they released their first full-length, Non Compos Mentis....

La Grange native Josie Dunne muscled her way onto the stages of local bars and venues at age 13. Four years later she signed a deal with Atlantic, and spent her final high school years traveling back and forth between suburban Chicago and Nashville while finessing her craft and writing for well-known musicians such as Kelly Clarkson (who passed on a song written by Dunne) and crossover social-media star Jacob Sartorius (who recorded “Chapstick,” cowritten by Dunne)....