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Puppetry is an art form that goes back millennia. Puppets are referenced in the ancient sacred Sanskrit epic the Mahabharata and shadow theater is still performed throughout India and southeast Asia, while its influence can be seen in the works of silhouette animators from Lotte Reiniger (The Adventures of Prince Achmed, 1926) to Michel Ocelot (Princes and Princesses, 2000). Japanese bunraku puppets have been around since the 17th century, about as long as kabuki theater, and are equally suited for the delicate conveyance of complex emotions....

The 2016 presidential election may have transformed Walter Benn Michaels from pariah to prophet of doom. In 2006, the University of Illinois at Chicago English professor published the polemic The Trouble With Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality, which makes the unpopular argument that liberalism’s single-minded obsession with diversity is a tool used by elites to distract from the greater evils of worker exploitation and economic inequality....

The pandemic has kept many of us from leaving the house, but honestly, why would you want to? There is too much TV to watch to go outside. Outside doesn’t have Hulu or Netflix or HBO Max. To encourage you to stay home and stay safe, comedian/writer Rima Parikh and myself (two people who watched just as much TV in the before times) will be diving deep into the shows we’re loving or lovingly hate-watching, social-distance-style, over Google chat....

I think it’s safe to assume that nobody in Chicago’s theater community had a worse 2016 than Darrell Cox and Joe Jahraus. Or deserved it more. Decades of bad behavior caught up with them in June, when the Reader published an exhaustive report by Aimee Levitt and Christopher Piatt, detailing physical and psychological abuse carried out by Cox (with Jahraus in the role of enabling sidekick) at their off-Loop home, Profiles Theatre....

I’ve seen only two films by Chinese documentary maker Wang Bing, but on the basis of ‘Til Madness Do Us Part (which played at Facets in 2016) and Bitter Money (which opens there today for a weeklong run), I’d aver that he’s one of the most exciting nonfiction filmmakers working today. Both movies deliver powerful lessons about injustice in contemporary China; they’re also immersive, formally challenging works that employ extended running times to make viewers think long and hard about what it’s like to live as the onscreen subjects do....

Fauvely front woman Sophie Brochu has built a creative life working with the warm, distorted tones of shoegaze; for much of the 2010s, she explored the style’s indie-pop possibilities in Chicago five-piece Videotape, and she’s helped push amps to their breaking points as part of the live lineup for Scott Cortez’s wall-of-sound project Astrobrite. Brochu launched Fauvely as a solo outlet in 2017, but she’s since turned it into a full-fledged band with the addition of guitarist-keyboardist Dale Price, drummer Dave Piscotti, and bassist Phil Conklin....

Michael Gebert Marcos Carbajal at Carnitas Uruapan If you order carnitas at a chain burrito place, you will likely get roasted, shredded pork shoulder. For Marcos Carbajal, that’s like using “barbecue” to mean only one kind of meat. “There’s shoulders, there’s ribs, there’s pork belly, there’s pork skin,” he says, pointing to each on a styrofoam plate we’ve just been handed at his family’s restaurant, Carnitas Uruapan in Pilsen. “Usually the shoulders and the ribs are the top two choices for beginning eaters....

The general public loves using long-running Detroit hip-hop duo Insane Clown Posse and their fans, better known as Juggalos, as avatars for just about anything convenient to its cause. After Trump narrowly won Michigan, a battleground state, in the 2016 election, I noticed handfuls of Twitter users blaming Juggalos (who, generally speaking, are white and blue-collar) when in fact white folks from all walks of life played a part in securing the state’s electoral votes for that orange buffoon....

Another 90s Halloween Party Dust off your flannel shirt and Doc Martens: it’s a 90s-themed costume party. The night includes a photobooth from Glitter Guts and fly gear from Kokorokoko. Sat 10/29, 9 PM-3 AM, Beauty Bar, 1444 W. Chicago, 312-226-8828, thebeautybar.com/home-chicago. Carmine’s Friday Fright Fest Chicago Woman magazine cohosts this event featuring a costume contest, appetizers, beer, and wine. A portion of the proceeds goes to first responders’ charity the 100 Club of Chicago....

Q: Married guy here. I’m 33, the wife is 31. Our fifth anniversary is next month but we’ve been together for almost eight years. We’ve recently both come out to each other as bi. She tried to tell me a long time ago whereas I came to the realization only recently. We’re both interested in new sexual encounters and this weekend we met up with a male escort. It was my first sexual experience with a man and the first sexual encounter between my wife and another man in eight years ....

Last month at the Winter Jazzfest in New York I saw keyboardist Craig Taborn share his deep love of heavy metal as a member of drummer Dan Weiss’s new Starebaby project—laying down fierce drones and doomesque power chords on synthesizer. At this point, nothing about Taborn ever surprises me—he’s got incredibly broad tastes, and he routinely follows his curiosity down all sorts of holes without ever surrendering his erudite, thoughtful approach or his ability to fit within any ensemble....

The Reader‘s archive is vast and varied, going back to 1971. Every day in Archive Dive, we’ll dig through and bring up some finds. As the front man for the band Pedro the Lion, David Bazan was Christian indie rock’s first big crossover star. His lyrics, Jessica Hopper wrote, “have a through-a-glass-darkly quality, acknowledging the imperfection of human understanding rather than insisting on the obviousness of an absolute truth.” But then something happened: Bazan lost his own faith....

Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process,” E.B. White once wrote. His words apply to The Room, an inept drama from writer-director-producer-star Tommy Wiseau that found instant cult status upon its release in 2003, earning the coveted word-of-mouth review “It’s so bad it’s good.” Ten years later, Wiseau’s costar, Greg Sestero, published a behind-the-scenes book called The Disaster Artist that chronicles his friendship with Wiseau and the clumsy production of The Room....

Video by Morgan Elise Johnson It began with an unsolicited e-mail—the kind of Hail Mary that artists send to radio DJs hoping for feedback or, God willing, a little airplay. In 2012 an 18-year-old south-side MC rhyming as Dreezy attached her new Mikey Dollaz collab, “Break a Band,” to a message addressed to Power 92 on-air personality DJ Nehpets. Nehpets couldn’t deny the track’s catchy hook or Dreezy’s microphone prowess—she crushes Dollaz with tireless speed and bravado....

Jake Ewald, best known as a guitarist and singer for Philly fourth-wave-emo heartthrobs Modern Baseball, launched this solo project under inauspicious circumstances a couple years ago—he’d hit a wall with the personal, almost diaristic songs he was writing for his main band. So he uprooted his imagination from the soil of his own day-to-day and instead populated a fictional town called Slaughter Beach, bringing it to life in euphoric, slightly rambunctious rock songs that make a beeline for the heart as surely as any Modern Baseball tune....

5 Loaves Eatery 5loaveschicago.com The kind of place every neighborhood wants, 5 Loaves Eatery is a brightly painted, friendly breakfast spot making delicious soul-food staples like chicken and waffles and shrimp and grits. And food with soul it is: the name comes from the five loaves that Jesus multiplied in Matthew, and the owners give away at least one free meal each day to someone in need. It’s a fitting replacement on 75th Street for Army & Lou’s, one of Chicago’s sorely missed soul-food spots....

You can’t talk about Canadian indie rock in the 2000s without Broken Social Scene, in part because the group is a community unto itself. This small musical army’s ranks include members of Metric, Stars, KC Accidental, Do Make Say Think, Apostle of Hustle, and an indomitable face of indie-pop crossover success, Feist. But as much as their grand, driven, and sometimes intimate style is representative of indie rock in the aughties, Broken Social Scene aren’t anchored by the past....

An Illinois appellate court handed police accountability activists a major victory Friday when it ruled that all police misconduct records going back to 1967 are subject to Freedom of Information Act requests. But now the Fraternal Order of Police, Chicago’s police union, says it plans to appeal the decision in a last ditch effort to block public access to the records. In compliance with this ruling, the city made an unprecedented move toward transparency, and prepared to release all records pertaining to misconduct for every Chicago police officer dating back to 1967....

A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. Wingtips, Exposure Therapy ‘Tis that season when I, like many other music writers, scramble to answer the question: “What great new music did I miss this year?” Well, when it comes to Chicago releases, the debut album from gothic postpunk duo Wingtips (aka Vincent Segretario and Hannah Avalon) certainly makes that list. Mixing dreamy pop and cold darkwave, it can make long winter nights feel a little more magical....

A pivotal scene in Sean Baker’s The Florida Project comes near the end of the film. Six-year-old Moonee (Brooklynn Prince) is eating breakfast at an Orlando hotel near the one where she lives with her mother, Halley (Bria Vinaite). Baker presents the little girl in close-up as she samples each item she took from the dining-room buffet and makes some cute comment about it, and he uses jump cuts to skip from one sampling to the next....