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Altar Boyz This toothless send-up of boy bands, Christian rock, and Catholicism (music and lyrics by Gary Adler and Michael Patrick Walker, book by Kevin Del Aguila, based on an idea by Marc J. Kessler and Ken Davenport) is too gentle to be called satire, too tongue-in-cheek to be taken seriously, too risque to be religious. The tunes, though, are easy on the ear, and the lyrics witty—or at least witty enough to keep an audience’s attention....

So you want to start watching Indian movies. Where to begin? The truth is, there is no one single starting point for such a wide and varied industry—or rather, series of interconnected industries, subdivided by region and language, producing nearly 2,000 films a year. Fandry (directed by Nagraj Manjule) Combining the worlds of the colonialism period-piece, the Bollywood musical, and the increasingly popular cricket movie, Lagaan (2001) was India’s last Best Foreign Language Film Oscar nominee, and with good reason....

The beauty of musical collaboration is that you can never totally anticipate what will happen, even when the people coming together have established aesthetics of their own. Some groups devise a concept and never stray from it, while others incorporate unexpected twists and turns—and Boston postmetal project Wear Your Wounds (started by Converge front man Jacob Bannon) has spawned a whole new band. As the story goes, Bannon and Wear Your Wounds guitarists Sean Martin (formerly of Hatebreed) and Mike McKenzie (the Red Chord) would start rehearsals with gnarly death-metal riffs that didn’t fit the group’s melodic, mournful template....

The final installment in the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy proves that the series’ BDSM-flavored sex scenes have always been the icing on the cake, a fluffy confection of wish fulfillment. In Fifty Shades Freed the wealth and lifestyle porn are more aggressive than the sex—which, by this point, newlyweds Ana Steele (Dakota Johnson) and Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan) mostly giggle through, along with the viewer. Far more titillating are the loving camera sweeps over palatial residences, designer threads, and souped-up cars; two of the sex scenes double as product placements (for Audi and Ben & Jerry’s)....

An essay posted the other day on the New Republic‘s website placed Antonin Scalia in not one pantheon but two. There’s the pantheon of Supreme Court justices such as Holmes and Cardozo, who “craft their words with brio, force, and wit.” Scalia’s “sneering tone” makes his dissents “hugely entertaining even where they are not rhetorically persuasive.” And there’s the literary pantheon. For Scalia possesses the “reactionary imagination” of a Yeats, Proust, Eliot, or Waugh....

Earlier this month, when the Chicago Public Schools inspector general issued a report that CPS CEO Forrest Claypool engaged in a “full-blown cover-up” of ethics violations and “repeatedly lied” to investigators, Mayor Rahm Emanuel tiptoed into the controversy. Rather than condemn his handpicked CEO, a longtime loyal factotum and friend, Emanuel said simply, “Forrest made a mistake,” and asked that no one make any snap judgments. Board of Education president Frank Clark immediately commended Claypool for “exemplary leadership” and said the board would review the report....

Longtime readers know Gossip Wolf rides hard for self-described “Marxist body horror act” Forced Into Femininity—aka the experimental solo project of former Coughs saxophonist Jill Flanagan. She says that on her new EP, I’m Making Progress, due October 7 via New York label Decoherence Records, she’s shifted away from “allegory and extended metaphor, instead addressing political concerns from the opposite perspective of punk—especially our own real positions as gatekeepers maintaining racism, classism, and sexism....

It’s a struggle to define the purpose of most music—the answer is perpetually changing, based on time, place, and innumerable other factors. But Los Angeles-based synthesist Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith seems to have homed in on something specific on her new album, The Mosaic of Transformation (Ghostly). The joyous, drifting melody of “Remembering,” the album’s second track, can be heard as an elemental distillation of contemporary synthesis. “Be kind to one another,” Smith sings, a reminder for the aberrant lives we’re all leading now; her sparkling composition evokes colors and mimics flutes, creating a sense of calm that’s too often hard to come by....

If you’re reading Book Swap—and you are—my bet is on your New Year’s resolution being to read more books. So in the first edition of Book Swap in 2019, I thought I’d share a glimpse of Nick Drnaso’s TBR pile and some of my own selections. Every Christmas my brother and I try to recommend presents to each other so we’re not passing the same gift cards back and forth. This year I asked him to buy me The Dinosaur Man by Susan Baur....

For longer than I care to remember Little Caesars (whose headquarters are located in Detroit) was the default cheap pizza of choice among certain unseasoned members of my household. Whenever their chums arrived with little to no notice, this inexpensive affront to Sicilian pizza was a reliable source of feed that could keep the monsters appeased. Then, a little less than two years ago, an outpost of Jet’s Pizza—the other Detroit-based pizza chain—opened in the neighborhood and accord was reached....

Rachel Kimura conducted more than a few experiments during the first growing season on her 1/8-acre Hinata Farms. One was an Asian version of the Native American companion planting method known as the Three Sisters. Kimura, one of eight small commercial farmers operating on a largely empty lot on the site of the former Robert Taylor Homes, planted popcorn on the edge of her plot. The stalks served as trellises for purple and green long beans to climb as they fixed nitrogen in the soil, while kabocha squash sprawled on the grounds to shade out weeds....

Rapper, poet, and actor Mykele Deville will become the Hideout’s next program director in August! Deville says his fiancee (and Growing Concerns Poetry Collective bandmate) McKenzie Chinn recommended he apply for the job after the Hideout put out a call at the end of May, and he’ll replace experimental pop musician and Sooper Records co-owner Sen Morimoto in the position. “I love being able to be that person to help people get heard and get seen,” Deville says....

As soon as I walked through the door, Saint Lou’s Assembly felt familiar. I’d never been to a meat-and-three cafeteria, a once-beloved, now mostly extinct institution that offers a choice of entree and three sides for one low price. But there was something about the vinyl booths, Formica tables, and wood paneling, not to mention the candy counter and the bowling trophies, that made me feel like I’d seen them before....

Rebecca Makkai is a Chicago author whose new novel, The Great Believers, is set during the AIDS crisis in Chicago in the 1980s. Albert Williams, a Chicago Reader contributor since 1985, has a long history as a gay activist and journalist. He served as editor of two Chicago LGBTQ newspapers in the 1980s, GayLife (1981-’85) and Windy City Times (1987). On the first hot day of spring of 2018, they sat down together at the Chicago Diner in the heart of Chicago’s Boystown to talk about The Great Believers and Chicago’s LGBTQ history, both real and imagined....

If Democrats only played the game of politics like Republicans, the Fair Tax Amendment would probably pass by an overwhelming majority. OK, let’s break it down . . . Governor Pritzker got the General Assembly to put on the ballot a referendum that, if approved by at least 60 percent of the voters, would raise the tax rates on people like Kenny G. And cut them on me! It was June....

Chicago noise artist Andy Ortmann (founder of Nihilist Records and Panicsville) is busy this season. On Thu 3/19 he joins Hanna Elliott of noise-rock duo Hogg at the Owl to host the DJ night Terrorvision, dedicated to minimal wave, goth, industrial, postpunk, and electronic music. Ortmann also has some new music out: the solo cassette Inconsequential via New Orleans label Thirdsex and a collaboration with Alex Barnett called Seasonal Attrition via Cleveland label Centre....

Editor’s note: this story has been updated with corrections and clarifications. With so many of their artist colleagues abruptly out of work, Chehade and Rosenberg brainstormed the possibility of a New Deal–type arrangement: put unemployed theater practitioners to work making PPE. For ARM, donations have so far paid about 20 theater artists a piece rate between $2.50 and $3.50 per mask, depending on the design. “Our target is to make sure people are making between $15 and $20 an hour,” said Ahern....

Update: To help slow the spread of COVID-19, this show has been postponed. Contact point of purchase for refund or exchange information. Colorado three-piece Velnias have always had their own distinctive blend of black, progressive, and folk metal: it builds slowly, and they give it a lot of room to breathe. They took their name from a primal Baltic forest god, and they’re very fond of passages of braided, interlaced clean guitar that verge on space metal....

Q: What is the best relationship advice you’ve ever received? Q: I have always loved anal sex with my partner of more than a decade. He loves it, too. We’ve noticed a trend over the years where he gets melancholy after we have anal sex. He doesn’t know why. Do you have any ideas or theories about why? A: If you can make yourself come, show your partner how you do it....

Had it been distributed widely and marketed properly, Takashi Miike’s Blade of the Immortal might have been a considerable art house hit. An epic in the Akira Kurosawa tradition, Blade features thrilling action sequences, three-dimensional characters, and long-gestating passages of suspense. Unfortunately it screened here only twice as part of the Chicago International Film Festival, and it never received a full run. It’s now available on DVD and BluRay, so viewers who missed it at CIFF can catch up with this grandly entertaining action fantasy....