The Pitchfork Music Festival has been around a dozen years—or a baker’s dozen, if you start with 2005’s Pitchfork-curated Intonation Music Festival. In that time it’s become one of the most renowned events of its kind in the U.S., in part because it insists on an aesthetic of its own rather than simply following trends on the contemporary festival circuit. But while Pitchfork doesn’t tend to book the same acts that make so many other big fests look similar every summer, it does have its own comfort zone....

Douglas Fairbanks as Robin Hood We’ve been remiss in failing to report on the summer screenings presented by the Silent Film Society of Chicago at the Pickwick Theatre in Park Ridge. The venerable programming organization has already shown the rare comedy It’s the Old Army Game (starring W.C. Fields and Louise Brooks), Fritz Lang’s Woman in the Moon, and Cecil B. DeMille’s The Whispering Chorus, but they still have three more screenings on the way....

The selections in this year’s Animation Show of Shows (curated, as always, by Ron Diamond) tend to be more amusing than inspired; my favorite works in the program provided me with momentary delight rather than lasting astonishment. The most representative piece may be Business Meeting, a pencil-drawn short from Brazil that delivers an absurdist send-up of corporate conferences. Running a little under two minutes, Business Meeting presents a distinctive style, serves up some laughs, makes its point, then promptly ends....

Don’t expect a media hotshot to ride into town and take over Sun-Times Media from Timothy Knight. In fact, Knight won’t be replaced at all. The CEO of parent company Wrapports LLC since 2011, Knight left Friday to become president of Northeast Ohio Media Group in Cleveland, his wife’s hometown. Now a trio of executives will run Wrapports’ businesses, according to the company. Jim Kirk, publisher and editor-in-chief of the Sun-Times, Paul Pham, senior vice president for business operations, and Sun-Times Network CEO Tim Landon will all report directly to board chair Michael Ferro....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Monday, March 27, 2017. There won’t be limits on campaign donations in upcoming governor’s race after Kennedy donation Businessman and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Chris Kennedy donated $250,100 to his own campaign fund, ending the limit on campaign donations for the 2018 Illinois gubernatorial race. If a candidate gives him- or herself more than $250,000 or an “outside independent expenditure group uses that amount of money to try to influence the outcome of an election,” the donation limit of $5,600 for individuals and $11,100 for unions and corporations is lifted in a statewide race, the Tribune reports....

Onibaba Yesterday, the University of Chicago’s Doc Films screened the Japanese cult item House, an “incredibly odd Japanese horror feature [that’s] like a Hello Kitty backpack stuffed with bloody human viscera,” writes J.R. Jones, quite accurately and, uh, poetically. (If you’ve never seen the film and missed Doc’s screening, the DVD is available via Criterion; you’ll understand pretty quickly what Jones is getting at there.) Japanese horror, often referred to simply as J-horror, has a long and rich history dating all the way back to the silent era....

Michael Brosilow Philip Earl Johnson, Larry Yando, and Shannon Cochran It’s practically impossible to miss the parallels between August Strindberg’s The Dance of Death and Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf—and somebody’s sure to point them out to you if by chance you do. I know I’ve found the resemblance noted everywhere I’ve looked, from Wikipedia to the program notes for Writers Theatre’s fierce production of the Strindberg play, built around a new adaptation by Irish playwright Conor McPherson....

Yesterday XXL magazine debuted its seventh-annual “Freshman cover” on BET’s weekday music video show 106 & Park, and in addition to profiling 12 buzzing rappers the issue could pass for a special about Chicago hip-hop. A third of the MCs who appear on the cover are local—Lil Bibby, Chance the Rapper, Lil Durk, and Vic Mensa—and they’ve all popped up in the Reader before. I first mentioned Lil Durk in my 2012 cover story on the relationship between local streetwear brands and rappers—Durk signed a deal with Def Jam in the middle of a major label gold rush aimed at scooping up new Chicago rappers earlier that year, and he’s occasionally appeared in my pieces since then....

The best of all things is something entirely outside your grasp: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. —Greek drunkard-god Silenus, quoted in Straight White Men by way of Friedrich Nietzsche And there beginneth the allegory: Jake and Drew are, of course, the white male faces of commerce and art, and Lee makes sure we understand how clubby they are. Long early stretches of SWM show them in unrestrained adolescent-regression mode, triggered by their return to the cozy family seat....

Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place. Older strips are archived here.

I gave a cursory listen to Libations & Meditations (Posi-Tone), the latest album by New York pianist Art Hirahara, when it dropped back in January. It sounded solid, and I put back on the shelf meaning to give it more time down the road. I wasn’t thinking that would be seven months later, but it was only this week that I really got to sit down with the trio recording, which features the wonderful Linda Oh on bass and John Davis on drums....

Michael Gebert Paul Kahan at the Publican, where he hosted his own honors “New York usually hosts the stars of the culinary industry, but here in Chicago we produce them,” said Mayor Rahm Emanuel, with perhaps a bit too much Second City aggressive defensiveness. As was demonstrated by his tribute to Charlie Trotter at yesterday’s James Beard Foundation Awards announcement of the 2014 nominees, held at the Publican, Chicago doesn’t need to bluster about having an important place in the culinary world....

Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place. Older strips are archived here.

A Master Builder Jonathan Demme hasn’t made a dramatic feature since his acclaimed Rachel Getting Married (2008), though his latest film, A Master Builder, has so many competing levels of authorship—it was adapted by Wallace Shawn from the Ibsen play, and staged over a period of many years by theater director Andre Gregory—that the finished product probably has more in common with Demme’s music movies than with Philadelphia or The Silence of the Lambs....

UPDATE: Both performances have been canceled due to an electrical fire that damaged the theater’s operational and mechanical equipment. Ticket holders will be contacted by a box office representative. The dance is full of images of abstract concepts: the beauty of nature, of melancholy, of angels, of the transience of love. In the sixth movement, for instance, a man lifting a woman evokes the inverse image—man uplifted by the ideal of love—which nonetheless appears as a mirage, here today, gone today, the world’s most gorgeous lie....

The independent booksellers of Chicago would like to let you know that their businesses are all alive and well. As a matter of fact, they’ve actually gained customers since their biggest collective competitor, Borders, closed in 2011. Moorehead also hopes the event will attract readers who usually shop at what he calls “a large Internet behemoth” that, at least for now, doesn’t generate any sales tax in Illinois. “It’s more than buying books,” he says....

For sale by owner: a big yellow diesel-powered step van. Extras include a Chicago food truck license, a website, several social media accounts with more than 10,000 followers, pierogi-making equipment, training, and access to special recipes for the Polish dumplings. “It can’t be, say, a coffee truck. This must remain a Pierogi Wagon,” says Warzecha over the phone on Wednesday. “The Pierogi Wagon will not be stopped.” Chicago’s harsh restrictions that ban food trucks from parking within 200 feet of a bricks-and-mortar restaurant led cupcake food-truck owner Laura Pekarik to file a petition to the Illinois Supreme Court in February, hoping the highest court would overrule the city....

“You wanna be a punk gang member or do you wanna be a gangster? This guy there has his pants hanging off his ass—the gang member standing on the street corner. This guy there has got tunnel vision, only sees so far. . . . This guy here—the gangster . . . is going to all the fine restaurants and nightclubs and going to political fundraisers, getting things done.” In the privacy of those locked cubicles, Sal told Hagedorn stories he had never heard before....

John Smith’s Blight (1996), a collaboration with composer Jocelyn Pook, screens Friday at the Logan Center for the Arts. The coming week is packed with experimental- film screenings (though not at the Chicago International Film Festival, which hasn’t presented any experimental work in decades). The most important of these are surely the programs of films by British director John Smith, who will be in attendance for all three. Each program spans the entirety of his five-decade career, meaning you can get a taste of his life’s work even if you attend just one event....