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It’s safe to say that unemployment isn’t Professor Wyndham Lathem’s biggest problem right now. Northwestern University abruptly fired him after he and a chat-room buddy from England allegedly stabbed Lathem’s boyfriend 70 times while carrying out a gory sexual fantasy and then fled across the country, giving rise to a nationwide manhunt. According to prosecutors at a bond hearing last week, Lathem and Warren planned to first murder several others and then themselves in an I-shoot-you-while-you-stab-me grand finale....

One of the biggest commercial hits of 2018, Black Panther introduced many viewers to Afrofuturism, a decades-old arts movement that combines traditional African culture with science-fiction and fantasy. This past January and February, Doc Films presented a seven-film series on Afrofuturism in cinema, with selections ranging from Blade (1995), the vampire adventure starring Wesley Snipes, to Space Is the Place (1974), about visionary jazz musician Sun Ra. And this Saturday at 7:30 PM, Chicago Filmmakers hosts a program of Afrofuturist short films from the past decade, curated by Floyd Webb of Black World Cinema....

Fri 2/17: Dominique Watkins and Briget Flaherty Diehl present CLUE: A Drag Extravaganza, a concert of sorts at Gorilla Tango Theatre (1919 N. Milwaukee) based on the popular board game and film that includes death drops, lip-syncing, and gender-bending. 8 PM Sat 2/18: Artist Michael Velliquette brings “Lovey Town,” a miniature mobile, interactive art space that uses photography to place visitors inside of it after they enter, to Mana Contemporary Chicago (2233 S....

facebook.com/lemonsthe Runner-Up Rapids

Flashbacks and Dream Sequences: The Story of the Moles I was recently made hip to the Moles, an Australian outfit who existed in two forms: as a band in the late 80s and early 90s, and as the brief moniker of singer-songwriter Richard Davies (who also fronted the band). My discovery is due to a recently released box set by the great Fire Records that collects the entire recorded output of any music issued under the Moles moniker....

Michael Gebert Amaro and other spirits in the CH Distillery line. Amaro is an Italian digestif, sweet and bitter at the same time, made by macerating regional herbs and botanicals into a neutral spirit. It’s become a popular ingredient as a bittering flavor in cocktails of late. CH Distillery’s signature spirit is their vodka made from Illinois grains, so it was an easy guess that it was the base for their amaro, which just went on sale a couple of weeks ago....

With multiple police abuse scandals and an impending potential teachers’ strike, this has turned out to be a kidney stone of a year for Mayor Emanuel. But the silver lining of Rahm’s reign has always been smart transportation policies, and our city racked up a remarkable number of wins in that department in 2015. Let’s take a look back at some of the key local walking, biking, transit, and public space stories of the past 12 months, in roughly chronological order....

The year is halfway over, and the movie to beat for my favorite Chicago premiere of 2015 remains Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice, which opened here in January. Vice is one of the most inspired literary adaptations I’ve seen—it’s so densely realized that watching the movie feels like wandering through Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 novel. Anderson claims that for his first draft of the script, he simply typed up the entire book in screenplay form, and the finished film preserves so many details from the book one can’t possibly catch them all on one viewing....

This year Marshmallow Fluff, America’s oldest brand of marshmallow creme, celebrates its 100th anniversary. It wasn’t the first commercially available version—that honor goes to a brand called Snowflake—but it has outlasted its rival by more than 50 years. And Fluff has a particularly devoted following, especially in Massachusetts, where it was invented and is honored with an annual “What the Fluff” festival. (The state also made national headlines in 2006 after a senator filed a measure that would limit serving Fluffernutter sandwiches in school cafeterias to once a week, which provoked outrage and prompted other legislators to propose making the Fluffernutter the state sandwich....

In April, President Donald Trump pledged not to deport undocumented immigrants with Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals status—aka “Dreamers”—telling the more than 875,000 people brought to the U.S. illegally as children that they should “rest easy.” I go into Pilsen and Back of the Yards to reach out to community members, helping them get knowledge. Aside from the education part of it, we are really making sure that we’re protecting one another in these very uncertain times....

I’ve used up a lot of words describing the dissatisfying state of ramen in this city. So it’s somewhat disgruntling to admit that I think I met the best ramen broth around at the newly revamped Boka—and it’s not employed in a soup. It’s in a grilled Spanish octopus appetizer. The precisely arranged tentacles rest in a shallow pool of roasted-pork broth that so effectively apes the collagen-rich sumptuousness of a proper tonkotsu broth it’s a shame chef Lee Wolen hasn’t thrown his hat in with the legions of ramen pretenders that have proliferated in the city these past few years....

One Day Pina Asked . . . (1983), Chantal Akerman’s TV documentary about German choreographer Pina Bausch, was made during a pivotal chapter in Akerman’s career, during which the Belgian filmmaker combined her minimalist style (most evident in her 1975 epic Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles) with elements of classic movie musicals. The previous year Akerman had released Toute une Nuit, a series of narrative fragments on the themes of romantic longing and fulfillment; there’s no singing, but the stylized sets and the characters’ dancelike movements suggest a sort of visual music....

RONALDO SCHEMIDT/AFP/GETTY IMAGES The Mexican navy arresting Sinaloa cartel leader El Chapo Guzman. Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, amuse, or inspire us. • That the armed reactionaries and conspiracists encamped around Cliven Bundy’s ranch have started fighting among themselves? —Tony Adler • About who the biggest hacks are when it comes to movie reviews, based on data from Metacritic? (Guess who’s one of just three critics judged “safe bets”?...

Time to plan the week. Here’s some of what we recommend: Wed 12/16: The Star Wars Dinner is a collaborative meal put together by Scott Manley of Table, Donkey and Stick (2728 W. Armitage), Nathan Sears of the Radler, Lawrence Letrero of Sable, Chris Davies of Homestead, and Caleb Trahan of Bread & Wine, each of whom created a course inspired by one of the six Star Wars films. Reservations required; seatings are between 5:30 and 9:30 PM....

Don’t expect smoky southern-style ribs at this sleek Chinatown spot at the far south end of Wentworth. These spares—Special Heaven’s Grilled Ribs—are of the fall-off-the-bone variety, steamed and then flash-fried before getting slathered with a brain-tingling compound of typical Sichuan spices: garlic, Sichuan peppercorns, green onion, green chile, and red chile oil. At $13.95 for a stack, these meat sticks provide the cheapest legal out-of-body experience at your disposal.

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....

For this year’s Reader Key Ingredient Cook-Off, we asked some of Chicago’s top chefs to create a dish to honor a person who influenced their cooking. The exercise stirred many kitchen memories. Dish: Shrimp ceviche with watermelon and gochujang

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....

This chart shows shifts in the makeup of Pitchfork’s roster over time. Genre areas are stacked, not overlapped—with the exception of “Indie rock,” each begins at the top of the genre beneath it, not at zero. “Heavy music” includes metal as well as whatever Swans and Lightning Bolt are. “Experimental” and “Miscellaneous” might seem interchangeable, but DJ sets and comedy fall into the latter (along with the likes of Bjork and Yoko Ono)....