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Bambi Banks-Couleé is resplendent in a bridal-white jumpsuit with spaghetti straps festooned with fringe as she introduces the episode. In case you didn’t catch the drift of the chyron in the bottom left corner that announces her as “the HBIC of THC,” she tells you outright: “I’m not just baking—I’m baking baking.” Banks-Couleé points to a conversation during her time in theater school that shaped her view about creating art: “Even in my young state of drag, I always knew that I wanted to produce my own creations....

When local underground hip-hop mainstay Mike “Mic One” Malinowski died in late July, you could see the grief online. On Twitter and Facebook, local rappers and producers—some active since the 90s, some with careers that began this decade—offered their condolences. Malinowski himself got started in the 90s as a member of the Noise Pollution crew, and he had roughly two decades of solo material under his belt—his first album as Mic One, Who’s the Illest?...

The pseudonymous Jane Martin (long rumored to be director Jon Jory or a collaboration between Jory and his playwright spouse, Marcia Dixcy), first birthed Keely and Du in the early years of the first Bill Clinton administration, when the culture wars were at a fever pitch (unlike every other time in U.S. history, I guess). But much like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, current grim events conspire to make this play about a pregnant rape victim held captive by Christian extremists to prevent her obtaining an abortion feel relevant all over again....

A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. Bjork‘s video for “Arisen My Senses” I love the visuals for Bjork’s 2017 album Utopia: the utopia they imagine is sensual, messy, feminine, androgynous, synthetic, and animal. I’m equally touched by the collaborations that helped make this utopia: drag makeup by Hungry, silicone headpieces and masks by James Merry, music videos by Jesse Kanda, and coproduction by Arca....

Coya Paz is an associate professor of Theatre Studies in The Theatre School at DePaul University. She is the artistic director of Free Street Theater and a Public Voices Fellow through The OpEd Project. But for all of our creativity as artists, the cultural sector as a whole is caught in an ever-repeating pattern. Accolades, be they awards, newspaper reviews, or Best Of lists, go to the usual suspects. Funding and audiences follow, creating a closed circuit that serves the same people over and over again and leaves the rest of us to wonder when—or if—our stories will ever really matter in our country’s national narrative....

A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. Useless Coordinates by Drahla Harold Budd, The Pavilion of Dreams I discovered composer Harold Budd through his 1986 project The Moon and the Melodies with members of Cocteau Twins. The 1978 release The Pavilion of Dreams has an all-star cast that includes Gavin Bryars and Brian Eno (who also produced). Opening track “Bismillahi ‘Rrahman ‘Rrahim” (Arabic for “In the name of God, the beneficent, the merciful”) features the gorgeous harp of Maggie Thomas and the serene saxophone of Marion Brown....

Colombian producer Lucrecia Dalt worked as a geotechnical engineer before she made crafting experimental electronics tracks a full-time endeavor. In May, Dalt, who now calls Berlin home, released her sixth album, Anticlines (Rvng Intl), which is named for the archlike geological feature of folded sedimentary layers. The album’s minimal, echoing sounds encourage anyone listening to decipher what exactly brought each note to light, to guess what each little detail could mean or reference, and to consider the sonic possibilities and unheard histories in the spaces around them....

Update: To help slow the spread of COVID-19, this show has been postponed until a date to be determined in the future. Contact point of purchase for refund or exchange information. Are Possessed a band or a hive of slavering meat puppets inhabited by time-traveling demons from the future? The case for the latter is strong. The Bay Area band’s 1985 classic, Seven Churches (Relativity/Combat), was death metal before death metal had chewed its way out of heavy metal’s womb....

The Shadows and the Light, the new album from Chicago drummer Quin Kirchner, is an eclectic collection of freewheeling studio performances with a diverse range of sounds. On its second track, “Batá Chop,” the album features influences of West African batá drum and traces of Afro-Cuban drumming (which Kirchner learned as a teenager while studying in Havana), but elsewhere there are bebop flourishes and interplanetary adornments originally stylized by the mystical jazz mad hatter, Sun Ra....

Chagrin Falls The premise of Mia McCullough’s tragicomedy would fit snuggly in the Coen brothers universe: the residents of a depressed Oklahoma town where the only employers are a prison and a cattle slaughterhouse—have their lives uprooted by a visiting Boston journalist on the eve of a death-row execution. Alcoholics experience war flashbacks, young dreamers fantasize Chekhov style about escape, and everyone engages in the futile task of trying to keep secrets under wraps in a rural community....

It’s been four years since Ka Baird of Spires That in the Sunset Rise moved from Madison to New York, and while she continues to work with bandmate Taralie Peterson (who’s still in Madison), by necessity they’ve devoted more energy to solo projects lately. Tomorrow night they’re both in Chicago (where Spires came into their own in the aughts as an engagingly odd psych-folk combo) for a concert at the Owl, but they’re not actually performing together....

Q: I’m a 35-year-old bisexual man in a LTR with a man. My question, however, has to do with my parents. As an adolescent/teen, I was a snoop (as I think most of us are, looking for dad’s porn stash, etc). I was probably 12 or so when I found evidence of my dad being a cross-dresser. There were pictures of him in makeup and women’s clothing, and correspondence (under an alias and to a separate PO box) with other men interested in cross-dressing....

It’s possible we are reaching a limit on how much we can hear about the compounded crises of the past year. An ad for sweatshirts that read “Liquor: the glue holding this 2020 shitshow together” showed up in my feed right in sync with the internal fear that the fast approaching 2021 will be more of the same. My former professor’s advice to writers this year was not to feel obligated to write the current moment, a moment that is marked by so much uncertainty....

Throughout his career reedist Ken Vandermark­ has often sought out elders as collaborators, working with Peter Brötzmann,­ Joe McPhee­, Fred Anderson,­ and Robert Barry­, among others. Vandermark learned from them on the bandstand and in the tour van, and in return elevated their music among younger listeners. That sort of cross-generational ethos is an important part of jazz’s oral transmission, and now that Vandermark himself is something of an elder statesmen, it’s heartening to see him exchanging knowledge and ideas with new generations of Chicago musicians....

I am not a fan of suicide, but if I could crawl into the chocolate churro souffle at Regards to Edith I would joyfully eat myself to death. With no regrets, I’d happily gaze down on the runner who snatches the plate away, delivering my remains to the dishwasher, who then blasts what’s left of me down the drain with a howitzer of hot steaming water. But more about this outstanding dessert later....

Eula Bliss It was Jeff Shotts, Eula Biss’s editor at Graywolf Press, who came up with the term “citizen-thinker” to describe her, and it’s remarkably apt. Biss isn’t afraid of knotty and complicated subjects—her two most recent books, Notes From No Man’s Land and On Immunity: An Inoculation, consider race and vaccination, respectively—but she’s no preacher or polemicist. Instead, she’s a writer of lucid, elegant prose. Her work is the result of care and time and serious thought: she begins not by choosing a position and doing research to support it, but with her own experiences and observations and dilemmas (like whether to vaccinate her newborn son)....

Everybody vs. Chris Jones and Hedy Weiss In February, Steppenwolf Theatre’s young adults program presented This Is Modern Art (Based on True Events), a new play by Chicago-based writers Idris Goodwin and Kevin Coval, about young street artists—also Chicago based—who in 2010 decided to tag the Art Institute’s new Modern Wing. Reader critic Albert Williams considered the show evenhanded: though “clearly sympathetic to the artists’ point of view,” it was “not blind to the impact their reckless act would have on their own lives....

I fished this jacket I hadn’t worn since last winter out of storage the other day and found a pin in the inside pocket that said, in small black capitals, “MAGIC COTTON BALLS.” Many playgoers around town probably have one of these pins lying around too, waiting to remind them that perhaps our best, most unique Chicago theater tradition—The Ruffians’ annual production of Burning Bluebeard, now in its eighth year of holiday runs—is around the corner again....

Near the end of her Sunday-night set at the Pitchfork Music Festival, Charlotte Emma Aitchison yelled, “Make some noise if me, Charli XCX, is one of the top 15 pop stars in the world!” The massive crowd, which stretched from the stage to the baseball diamond half a park away, howled in response. “Keeping it arrogant, but also fair, you know?” smirked Charli from behind black sunglasses. The highlight of the set was Charli’s most recent single, “Gone,” a duet with Christine & the Queens that she debuted in May at Primavera Sound in Barcelona....

“What about Stonewall?” the interviewer asks. The conversation is part of an oral history collected for the Leather Archives & Museum by acclaimed leather writer and educator Jack Rinella. It’s between him and one of the most influential tattooers in American history whose success is owed, in large part, to involvement with gay Chicago. If Chuck Renslow was the heart of Chicago’s leather community, Raven was the valve. He shuttled the community’s ideas and influence into a career that elevated the craft and safety of tattooing; but soft-spoken and modest, a man of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” generation, Raven minimized this....