“There are no two words in the English language more harmful than good job,” declares Terence Fletcher, the viciously demanding jazz instructor in Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash. This sentiment doesn’t seem to have registered with critics, though, because Whiplash is one of the best-reviewed films of 2014. The lobby poster is chockablock with glowing blurbs and studded with the sort of gerunds that make publicists tremble: exhilarating . . . astounding ....

Thursday night WTTW aired an hour-long documentary, My Neighborhood: Pilsen, the centerpiece of a multimedia project on a part of Chicago that’s preoccupied with something the documentary barely mentioned. And with that oblique observation the program abandoned the subject. My Neighborhood: Pilsen is a mosaic, a look at Pilsen that doesn’t linger on anything and neither imposes nor extracts any particular point of view beyond the celebratory. “We’re survivors,” said someone at the start, though of what wasn’t made clear....

For Wyatt Cenac, the best stand-up material comes from stepping out of his front door, heading down the familiar way, and observing the hypergentrifying world around him. On last year’s Netflix-released comedy special Wyatt Cenac: Brooklyn the former Daily Show With Jon Stewart correspondent settles into a pair of shows at Park Slope’s Union Hall to pretty much take the audience sitting in front of him to task. But Cenac is as cool as they come when he’s riffing, for example, about how out of whack the very existence of an artisanal mayonnaise retailer makes Brooklyn appear....

ENNO KAPITZA – AGENTUR FOCUS Art Spiegelman Looking for something to do today? Agenda‘s got you covered. For more on these events and others, check out the Reader‘s daily Agenda page.

“Where in the world did you find this?” Not just any gold record they give away to bands or artists that sell enough and move enough units to warrant it. Not a meaningless symbol of recorded sales of a dying industry. But a symbol of humanity, an effort to capture what life was like on a pale blue dot in a far-off solar system. “I had it made. I did some research....

In November, Coffey reached a settlement in a civil rights complaint filed with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development that alleged systemic housing discrimination on the part of the East Chicago Housing Authority. HUD has provided the authority with $1.9 million to administer housing vouchers, provide relocation counselors, and pay for other moving expenses. West Calumet was built in the 1960s and ’70s atop a defunct lead smelter....

A year and a half ago, I visited Emily Kempf’s home in Pilsen to interview her about her then-active cassette label Cool Girl Tapes. The walls of her living room were papered with black-and-white ink drawings of goblets and flowers and four-eyed women—illustrations that looked like they belonged in a deck of tarot cards. Kempf explained that the sketches decorating her walls were tattoo designs—she had begun using her home as a makeshift tattoo studio, hand-poking her art onto friends and a small client base familiar with her work through Instagram....

Fey (left) with Jane Fonda in This Is Where I Leave You At several points in This Is Where I Leave You, Wendy Altman (Tina Fey) responds to another character’s emotional outburst by grabbing him or her by the upper arm and giving a firm, but not-too-firm squeeze. It might be the closet thing to a consistent character trait one finds in this loose collection of screenwriter’s tics. The movie is flagrantly opportunistic in the way it deploys Fey....

David Banks/Getty Images Jeff Samardzija leaves an April game against the Diamondbacks in the eighth with a 5-2 lead. The Cubs lost, 7-5. The White Sox and Cubs square off this week, and I’ve got my bets down with two poker buddies who happen to be Cubs fans. I grew up in Sox territory, the south side, and my friends are from Cubs country, Iowa and Indiana. Either the Cubs don’t hit for Samardzija, or he leaves the game with the lead and the bullpen squanders it....

Let It Be After the reunited Replacements played a gigantic homecoming show in Saint Paul, Minnesota, a couple of weeks ago, the Internet started buzzing with the possibility of a new record from the indie-rock legends. While I absolutely love the Replacements, so many reunion records of the past have been such overwhelming disappointments (see: Indie Cindy by the Pixies) and I don’t think I can handle seeing that happen to another band so dear to me....

Brian Jackson / Sun-Times Media Alderman Howard Brookins Jr. argues—and hopes—that his support for the policies of Mayor Rahm Emanuel won’t haunt him at election time. It’s increasingly clear that in the upcoming municipal elections, everyone will be running against Mayor Emanuel in one way or another. This is especially the case in black and Hispanic areas that have borne the brunt of the mayor’s closings and cuts. And if Lewis, Fioretti, or other mayoral candidates inspire pissed-off people to get to the polls—which hasn’t happened in big numbers since the 1980s—lots of aldermen could be in trouble....

During the early era of Demdike Stare, the Manchester duo of Sean Canty and Miles Whittaker didn’t bother with subtlety in cultivating their mystique. Their interest in horror and the occult was reflected in their album-cover art, their name (appropriated from a 17th-century English witch), and their experimental live performances, which were augmented by dark, menacing visuals assembled from obscure films. It all went quite well with the ominous qualities of their ambient sound, which is sometimes eclectic in its sampling of unearthed subgenres and sometimes dead still, hinting at the kind of paranoia you might feel if you were alone downstairs in an old-world house and heard a creak from a floorboard above you....

Matthew Reeves Porn and Chicken Looking for something to do today that doesn’t involve green beer or bagpipes? Agenda‘s got you covered. For more on these events and others, check out the Reader‘s daily Agenda page.

Andreas von Ahn Truckfighters Looking for something to do today? Agenda‘s got you covered. For more on these events and others, check out the Reader‘s daily Agenda page.

Silk Road Rising, under the direction of Jamil Khoury and Malik Gillani, has been a Chicago institution for amplifying Asian-American and Middle Eastern-American artistic voices since 2002. In keeping with the company’s stated core values of discovery, pluralism, and empathy, the New China Festival, led by director Helen Young, will present a trio of staged readings of plays by authors from the Chinese-speaking world from August 4 through 19. 8/4-8/19: Sat-Sun 4 PM, see website for performances, the Chicago Temple, 77 W....

There’s a lot going on at the General, a bar/taqueria/general store in Logan Square that, like the neighborhood, is named after General John A. Logan. It’s a western-themed saloon serving locally sourced food with southern and Mexican influences. The general store in front offers staples like milk, bread, eggs, and produce, as well as beer and wine. And, improbably, it all works—especially if you’re seated on the back patio on a late summer evening....

I have hacked into Samir Jilani’s network with my iPhone in order to browse a virtual dossier containing his private e-mails. My next task: deciding whether or not the tech CEO poses a terrorist threat to the U.S. Created by Chicago-based indie developers Mike Boxleiter and Greg Wohlwend and released in April, TouchTone is designed to play like most of the innocuous fare on Apple’s App Store—at least on the surface....

The album that gives this musical biopic its name has been heralded as one of the most important in popular music. Straight Outta Compton (1988), by the Los Angeles rap outfit N.W.A. (“Niggaz Wit Attitudes”), thrust gangsta rap (or as characters in the film sometimes call it, “reality rap”) into the mainstream, combining Dr. Dre‘s funk-fused production style with some of the most violent, enraged lyrics ever heard. The first three tracks, “Straight Outta Compton,” “Fuck tha Police,” and “Gangsta Gangsta” became particularly notorious for their murderous allusions....

ARTIST: Timothy Breen SHOWS: Moon Bros. April residency at the Hideout MORE INFO: timothybreen.blogspot.com

Michael Gebert Charles Joly, back in the Drawing Room days If you were wondering whether those weirdly conceptual drinks at the Aviary are really worth the asking price, well, the cocktail world has chimed in to say, “hell yeah.” Charles Joly, the Aviary’s chief bartender and beverage director, won the Diageo World Class 2014 competition in London, where he was one of 48 competitors from around the world, and has been named the best bartender in the world by a panel of judges that included cocktail maven Dale DeGroff and others....