Rick Majewski moved to Chicago to study photography at Columbia College in 2008, when digital was edging out film and disruption was the order of the day in journalism. “I wanted to be a photojournalist at the worst possible time,” the 30-year-old says. Despite the gloomy job prospects, Majewski pushed on. He’d been inspired by a road trip he took before moving to Chicago, during which he went to Baja California, with a photographer friend who’d traveled extensively through Mexico....

Brooklyn’s Uniform and Portland’s the Body are two of the world’s harshest purveyors of postindustrial noise, so it was really only a matter of time before these like-minded duos joined forces to up the ante. On this summer’s Mental Wounds Not Healing (Sacred Bones), the members of both bands bring all their signature tricks to the table in laying out seven succinct tracks of unadulterated darkness. Some songs drag behind the beat due to the purposeful sludge-drumming of the Body’s Lee Buford, while his bandmates grind ahead, propelled by the pushy, repetitive electronic beats....

Saba is one of Chicago’s best current musical exports. He’s spent most of April and May touring the U.S. and Canada in support of the alternately scalding and beautiful Care for Me, and his late-afternoon Red Stage set on Friday at Pitchfork was his first hometown show of the year. The emotional epicenter of that self-released album, which came out in April, is “Prom/King,” a vivid, even-handed recounting of the 24-year-old rapper’s friendship with his murdered cousin, Walter Long Jr....

A combo of tortured and defiant, the hard-nasal wail of Salvation front man Jason Sipe is one that every angsty young punk who grew up on the streets of the 90s fantasized about. Like Cobain meets Yow meets Dremel Saw-Max applied to pavement, it slices through the trio’s loosey-goosey noise rock—which lands somewhere between the posthardcore of early era Rye Coalition and the manic punk of Louisville’s long-gone Lords—and drags the gnarled remnants behind....

Eat chocolates, little girl; Eat chocolates! Believe me, there is no metaphysics in the world other than chocolates; Believe me, all the religions together do not teach more than the candy shop,” wisely wrote the late Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. His words came to me after I entered the Logan Square storefront of Katherine Anne Confections. The salted-caramel iced drinking chocolate ($5, with a flight of three for $9) obliterated any further considerations from my mind....

The New Yorker‘s Adam Gopnik has an essay in the forthcoming May 15 issue that looks back at the American revolution and wonders if we’ve hopelessly romanticized it. The revolution, he writes, can be understood as the New World edition of a “much larger political quarrel throughout the British Empire” between radical reformers and “intellectuals and aristocrats” committed to a robust, efficient, and profitable empire. The first gave us the USA; the second gave us Canada....

In the waning days of the Obama administration, the Department of Homeland Security announced the recipients of $10 million worth of grants through its flagship counterterrorism initiative vaguely monikered “Countering Violent Extremism” (CVE). These were mostly law enforcement and community organizations, including two local groups, the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority (or ICJIA, a state agency that creates policy and researches ways to make the state justice system more efficient) and Life After Hate (a nonprofit that works to “off-ramp” people from white supremacist and other extremist movements)....

Sun-Times Media The Newberry Library’s freedom of speech award is named for former governor John Peter Altgeld, who granted clemency to anarchists rounded up after the Haymarket bombing. The Newberry Library will stage its annual salute to society’s trouble-making element this Saturday in Bughouse Square, a traditional gathering place for unruly rabble. Altgeld was elected governor in 1892, and in ’93 he granted clemency to the three surviving defendants on the grounds that their trial had been a travesty....

Dead Birds Ethnographic filmmaking has been enjoying a little renaissance over the past several years. The recent documentaries Sweetgrass, Leviathan, and Manakamana, all produced by Harvard University’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, may be the most popular examples of the form to come out in decades, and the noted experimental filmmakers Ben Russell and Ben Rivers have both cited ethnographic cinema as a primary source of inspiration. On Monday night at 8 PM, the Nightingale will pay tribute to a trailblazing figure in this field, Robert Gardner, who passed away last month at 88, with a free presentation of his 1964 documentary Dead Birds....

Over the past few months I’ve regularly basked in the liquid guitar, sensual singing, and seductive grooves of Urgent Jumping! East African Musiki Wa Dansi Classics (Sterns). The two-disc, 27-track anthology consists of music recorded mostly in Kenya and Tanzania between 1972 and 1982, a golden era when ideas flowed freely from Congo toward the eastern coast. Along the way Congolese soukous mingled with local traditions: in Kenya the result was called zilizopendwa, in Tanzania zilipendwa (both terms translate roughly as “golden oldies”)....

Reeling: The Chicago Lesbian & Gay International Film Festival celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2011, then went on hiatus for a year as festival director Brenda Webb and her staff pondered “how the festival might expand or evolve to better address the changing needs of LGBT filmmakers.” When Reeling returned last year it had adopted a new, more inclusive subtitle—The Chicago LGBT International Film Festival—and Webb had handed over programming duties to Richard Knight Jr....

COURTESY METAL CHURCH Metal Church 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.

Brian Kersey/Getty Image White Sox second baseman Leury Garcia bunts his way on to lead off the 11th yesterday. Garcia came around to score the winning run. The White Sox were in the right place at the right time again yesterday—in a ballpark with Minnesota. They beat the helpful Twins at the Cell, 7-6 in 11 innings. No baseballs were harmed in the making of the winning rally. Meantime, the good news for the Cubs last night was that their leadoff hitter, Emilio Bonifacio, who had four hits in the team’s first game in Pittsburgh, collected five more yesterday—plus a walk....

Shortly after I took over as the Reader‘s music editor in April 2004, I started working with Plastic Crimewave—aka Chicago musician, label head, promoter, illustrator, and zine author Steve Krakow—to debut the Secret History of Chicago Music, a hand-drawn and hand-lettered single-frame comic devoted to “pivotal Chicago musicians that somehow have not gotten their just dues,” in the words of Krakow’s tagline. Tonight at the Empty Bottle, Krakow will sign copies of My Kind of Sound at a release party that also features a full lineup of music: glam-pop weirdo Bobby Conn presenting a multimedia show called “My Chicago,” long-running avant-garde collective Ono, 70s psychedelic proto-power pop group Athanor, and early-80s synth collective VCSR....

Courtesy of Paul Cherry’s Facebook page Paul Cherry Local label-slash-collective FeelTrip is gearing up to release a handful of albums leading up to the end of the year, and today it offered up the debut single from Chicago pop-rock wiz Paul Cherry, “Everybody’s Burning Out.” Visual artist Weston Getto Allen put together a bizarre, lo-fi, slightly NSFW video for Cherry’s irresistible, buoyant number, which shows a day in the life of a freewheeling, drug-addled musician as he stumbles through LA; the whole video is made up of point-of-view shots so you can see the dude send texts, pop pills, and get beat up from his perspective....

When Chicago powerviolence band Weekend Nachos started playing in 2004, “We honestly had no serious goals,” says front man John Hoffman. “We just wanted to sound like Kungfu Rick, a Chicago grindcore band we all grew up listening to, and we wanted to have chaotic live shows like they did. I definitely feel we accomplished that and so much more.” Coming To An End by KUNGFU RICK Considering what Weekend Nachos have done since then, “so much more” is an understatement....

A handful of Chicagoans will go to the polls on March 18 and do something remarkable: they will ask for a Republican ballot. Macklin hopes to help change this inclination. Since 2012 he’s been the GOP committeeman of the 6th Ward, an office he won by amassing 62 votes, crushing his main opponent, Jackie Robinson, who got 29. “My true affinity has always been with the Republicans,” Macklin says. “I’ve been thinking like one all my life....

For nearly a decade a monument to dog waste has been prominently displayed at the corner of Wolcott and Augusta as a reminder to residents to pick up after their pooches. Polish-American artist Jerzy Kenar, whose work has graced Saint Constance Church and the Holy Trinity Polish Mission, had too many instances of stepping out of his house to find dog shit in his front garden. These fecal misfortunes inspired him to create Shit Fountain, a dookie-shaped coil of bronze atop a cement column....

Chicagoans is a first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. This week’s Chicagoan is Kristi Harreld, tutor. “So then I’ll pull something out of their backpack or binder: ‘What’s this? Has the teacher talked to you about these quizzes? Look at this note the teacher wrote you.’ They’ll say, ‘Oh, I didn’t see that.’ Yeah, OK. We all get that you’re maybe not telling the truth....

As a noted U.S. distributor of contemporary French cinema (Tell No One, Il Divo, Séraphine, Monsieur Lazhar, Mesrine, OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies), Music Box Films has a pretty good grasp of what’s going on in la Republique Francaise, which makes this fourth annual installment of the Chicago French Film Festival, Friday through Tuesday at the Music Box Theatre, an important event on the city’s filmgoing calendar. Only four titles from the festival were available for preview, but check out musicboxtheatre....