Deanna Isaacs The courtyard of Mecca Flats as seen in city historian Tim Samuelson’s installation Chicago-based Israeli artist Jan Tichy’s “aroundcenter,” which opened earlier this month at the Chicago Cultural Center, features three contiguous galleries filled with Chicago-centric photographs and videos, starting with selections from the 1986-’87 documentary photo project “Changing Chicago.” Like most scavenger hunts, this is more about the process than the payoff. History of Painting, for example, is a trio of window shades constructed of thousands of slides from the SAIC’s art history collection....

3740 N. Clark 773-549-205 Runner-Up Mike Finnegan of Cobra Lounge

Night Moves This year’s edition of the Chicago African Diaspora Film Festival kicks off Friday with Freedom Summer, a strong documentary about the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s summer 1964 campaign to register black voters in Mississippi. Check out our coverage of the festival, with six new reviews. Also this week, we recommend The Case Against 8, about the legal battle to have California’s ban on same-sex marriage struck down; Mother Joan of the Angels, a 1960 Polish shocker about a Catholic nun possessed by demons; Night Moves, the latest from writer-director Kelly Reichardt (Wendy and Lucy), with Jesse Eisenberg, Dakota Fanning, and Peter Sarsgaard as eco-terrorists plotting to blow up a hydroelectric dam; and The Signal, a paranoid sci-fi mystery about three young people who, chasing after a mysterious hacker, come in contact with an alien life force....

youngcoupleseries.com Nic (Brianna Baker) and Chris (Brandon Ogborn) are the titular young couple. The fledgling webseries Young Couple succeeds because of the chemistry between its stars, Chicago improv vets Brandon Ogborn and Brianna Baker. Ogborn and Baker previously collaborated on TomKat Project, a theatrical riff on Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes’s marital bliss—or whatever the hell it was/wasn’t—which Ogborn wrote and in which Baker played a dozen characters. In Young Couple, though, they shuck voyeuristic absurdity for intimate sincerity and play a young Chicago husband and wife....

Aladdin Not that it matters, but this live touring version of the Broadway musical based on a 1992 Disney animation is shrill, bombastic, and almost hysterically chipper. Everything the cast and designers bring to the tale of Aladdin—a petty thief who becomes a mensch and then a sultan—is top-notch, from Jonathan Weir and Reggie de Leon’s comic villains to Anthony Murphy’s outsize Genie to the glinting, golden Cave of Wonders created by set designer Bob Crowley....

Maya Deren’s The Witch’s Cradle screens as part of an avant-garde shorts program this Thursday at Co-Prosperity Sphere. “If there’s a documentary about political activism from the 1970s that was shot on 16-millimeter, then chances are I’m going to show it,” said programmer Michael W. Phillips at a South Side Projections screening last year. Phillips has yet to screen every film that fits this description, but that’s not to say he isn’t trying....

AP Photo/Las Vegas Review-Journal, John Locher He claims to be “just like Rosa Parks,” but he looks just like Cliven Bundy to me. Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, amuse, or inspire us. • The New York Times Sunday Dialogue about school segregation and the “choice” remedy? —Steve Bogira • Matthew Weiner’s Paris Review interview? —Aimee Levitt

Courtesy of Kit Kit This week’s edition of Gossip Wolf includes some news about Kit, the Chicago-via-Cincinnati rapper behind last year’s moody, subterranean New Wavey mixtape. As Gossip Wolf mentions, the MC recently linked up with west-coast producer Dixie Hype and made a tune called “I Bop,” an homage to the posi, ebullient bop scene born on Chicago’s west side. Given the subject at hand, it kind of sounds like Dixie Hype took the high-pitched, melodic synths from a number made for bopping and slowed them down to help create the hazy, leaned-out melody that’s very much in Kit’s wheelhouse; to fit the spirit of the song, Kit uses a bit of Auto-Tune on his vocals and sings about, well, bopping....

First Aid Kit Thing kicks off this week with a bang when long-running crossover thrash band D.R.I. bring their fury to Reggie’s on Monday night; that night there’s also a great free gig at Empty Bottle with local postpunk bands Population, Magical Beautiful, and Columbia Fasciata. On Tuesday the suburbs go metal when Red Fang and Big Business bare down on Berwyn’s Wire on Tuesday night. There’s also dance-punk band Moving Units at the Bottle and Josh Krajcik at City Winery....

Towards the end of his brand new EP, TreeSwag, New Deal Crew rapper Chris Crack ad-libs, “You know when I’m on a Tree beat, man, I’m on good bullshit.” Local “soul trap” originator Tree produced TreeSwag (hence its title), so there’s a reason Crack makes an impromptu comment about Tree’s intoxicating and lean instrumentals. And even though Crack is basically saying the entire EP is, well, “good bullshit” because he’s working with Tree, he approaches every song with the same mix of genuine enthusiasm and earnestness he displays in the ad-lib on “Off Da Pot....

Sway Bay Area shoegaze act Whirr have a new full-length, Sway, coming out at the end of the summer on Graveface Records, and this week they released a preview track from it called “Mumble”—it’s today’s 12 O’Clock Track. Whirr have always been masters at creating sweeping, glacial, dream-rock epics, but this new song sees them taking on their signature style with a bit more urgency. The beat pulses and pushes rather than floats, and an overdriven bass line drives the whole song....

Earth 2: Special Low-Frequency Version On Thursday night pioneering drone act Earth will be playing at the Empty Bottle. The band, whose original lifespan lasted from 1989 to 1997, got back together about ten years ago and have since been exploring mellow, acoustic, pretty, psych-folk experiments—and while recent Earth material is great, it doesn’t quite do it for me like their early work. When the band, led by Dylan Carlson, started out, they focused on super-slow-motion sludge-metal riffage, sounding almost like Black Sabbath slowed down beyond any comprehension....

The best thing about Samantha Roby’s Instagram feed is how colorful it is. While so much of today’s amateur food photography is moodily lit and focused on slabs of meat, the imagery on Roby’s Chicago Food Authority tends more toward a bright shot of soft-serve topped by rainbow sprinkles or a hummus plate accented by multihued fruits and vegetables. She does a lot of the photography on her own, but she also tags shots she likes—which, for the novice, is the equivalent of 15 minutes of Instagram fame (the feed has around 28,000 followers)....

Bank of America Theatre 18 W. Monroe 312-902-1400 chicago-theater.com/theaters/bank-of-america-theater Runner-Up Musical of the Living Dead

The University of Chicago 5801 S. Ellis Runner-Up Northwestern University

ARTIST: Derek Hatfield SHOWS: Dead & Co. at Wrigley Field on Fri 6/30 and Sat 7/1 MORE INFO: hatfielddesign.com

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Tuesday, September 12, 2017. Jason Van Dyke’s statements about Laquan McDonald shooting sealed by judge A Cook County judge has sealed statements former Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke made to an investigator two days after he shot Laquan McDonald to death in 2014. Cook County judge Vincent Gaughan ruled that prosecutors will not be able to use the audio recording or transcript of the interview during Van Dyke’s trial for first-degree murder....