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Palestinian producer and rapper Muqata’a is the godfather of Ramallah’s underground hip-hop scene. In 2007, while recording under the name Boikutt, he cofounded hip-hop collective Ramallah Underground, which lasted just two years but toured internationally and collaborated with the Kronos Quartet (“Tashweesh” on Kronos’s 2009 album Floodplain). Since then, he’s been pushing hip-hop to its transgressive fringes as Muqata’a, which roughly translates to “disrupt.” His November instrumental album, Inkanakuntu (Souk/Discrepant), shares as much with outre dance music and rhythm-focused experimental compositions as it does with oddball beat-scene productions....

Eye Vybe Records founder Karissa Talanian, who also plays in this wolf’s fave “witch punk” trio, Lil Tits, launched Good Vybes Fest in 2014, and the vibes just keep getting better. This year the fest expands from two days to three, all at the Empty Bottle. After dates on Friday, May 13, and Saturday, May 14, the fest takes a rest on Sunday, then closes Monday, May 16, with a free show jam-packed with local favorites....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Wednesday, December 28, 2016. Book explores how Mayor Richard M. Daley turned Chicago into the “city of spectacle” A new book, Building the City of Spectacle: Mayor Richard M. Daley and the Remaking of Chicago, cowritten by UIC political science professor Dennis R. Judd, explores how Daley rehabbed the city’s image with Millennium Park, the Museum Campus, and Navy Pier, making it into a popular tourist destination....

You probably are well aware of the benefits of kratom by now: pain relief, euphoria, reduced anxiety, and more. As a result, kratom is exploding in popularity lately. But where to get some? And which vendors are trustworthy? For this post we set out to answer that question. After doing 30 hours of research and testing 11 different online vendors, we found the six best kratom sellers online. These shops were all scored against four main criteria: quality, variety, shipping, and of course, packaging design....

It seems that audiences now expect film festivals to be road shows of the latest and greatest in independent, art house, and foreign cinema rather than an opportunity to discover work not yet buzzed about. This year’s Chicago European Union Film Festival lineup has plenty of the latter, and the chance to discover new films and filmmakers makes perusing the schedule all the more exciting. Polish master Krzysztof Zanussi, whose works from the 70s and 80s are among the greatest Polish films ever made, again foregrounds his preoccupation with faith in Ether, a Faustian historical drama in which the anesthetic, here in the hands of an amoral doctor, serves as a metaphor for both power and pain, specifically the ability to either exacerbate or alleviate the latter....

One of the headiest of all avant-garde jazz heads is Alan Braufman. The veteran saxophonist, flutist, and composer has been wielding his polymathic wizardry since the early 1970s, when he helped put New York City’s loft-jazz movement on the map. But most younger listeners didn’t get their first chance to immerse themselves in his towering, soulful, and freewheeling maelstrom until 2018: that’s when Braufman staged his improbable second act, thanks to a reissue of his out-of-print and hard-to-find 1975 debut, Valley of Search, a crucial document of fire-breathing downtown NYC out jazz....

Enigmatic former Chicagoans Wrekmeister Harmonies wrote their seventh full-length, We Love to Look at the Carnage (Thrill Jockey), in a cold, isolated farmhouse in upstate New York and recorded it in Brooklyn the following summer with producer Martin Bisi. This time around, the core duo of J.R. Robinson and Esther Shaw added insightful, versatile percussionist Thor Harris (Swans, Shearwater) and confrontational, challenging electronicist Jamie Stewart (Xiu Xiu). Neither of these musicians is a stranger to the trevails of laying oneself open in dark and challenging work, which makes them perfect collaborators for an album whose loose concept has to do with the late hours that start well after midnight and end before dawn....

Qwife issues. lack of intimacy. cuckold, etc. —need help And if restoring your sex life isn’t incentive enough to drop the subject, NH, this Savage Love reader’s experience might inspire you to drop it: “My husband, almost exactly ten years older than me, confessed a cuckold fetish to me shortly before our fifth anniversary,” a happily married straight lady wrote me in 2012. “I said no, but a seed was planted: Whenever I would develop a crush on another man, it would occur to me that I could sleep with him if I wanted to....

Born Edward Larry Gordon in 1943, composer, zither maestro, and experimental musician Laraaji has spent his life making music that captures humanity’s pulse and then some. He’s walked a colorful path while connecting threads between Sun Ra’s experimentation and Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda’s devotional music with new age mysticism and critically championing ambient music and performative public art. Born in Philadelphia, Laraaji took up musical composition with a scholarship to Howard University, got hooked on the comedy circuit, moved to New York, and wound up with a role in Robert Downey Sr....

Traci Godfrey’s dramedy, now in its midwest premiere at Artemisia Theatre directed by Julie Proudfoot, begins with Ellie (Molly Lyons) pulling her secret stash of booze out of a cowboy boot. That perfect snapshot of a gesture hints at the comedy and drama to come, though neither prove integrated enough in the proceedings to enhance each other’s impact. Ellie is the small-town, bigoted, and generally drunk mother of Kate (Scottie Caldwell), who has grudgingly returned home to Texas from New York City for a visit....

Among the staff at Uptown’s Black Ensemble Theater, company founder and CEO Jackie Taylor is colloquially referred to as “the Queen.” I wonder if that makes associate director Rueben D. Echoles—whose influence and directorial interpretation of the jukebox biomusical is recognizable up and down BE’s roster of original plays—a duke. For better and worse, as writer and director, Echoles’s latest rundown of a diva’s discography exhibits all the cogs audiences have come to expect in BE’s well-oiled machine....

Free Comic Book Day is upon us again! The 17th annual celebration of independent comic book stores happens on Saturday, May 4, and promises plenty of local programming (and, more importantly, free issues of select comic books). The official website at freecomicbookday.com/catalog lists all the titles that may be available for free. Individual stores are free to make their own rules, so don’t go in thinking you’re going to walk out with a wheelbarrow full of titles....

After seven years of interpolating holiday favorites and classic material by free-jazz icon Albert Ayler—including the saxophonist’s screaming gospel fervor—in his annual December concert in Chicago, reedist Mars Williams is expanding the concept in 2017. To support Mars Williams Presents: An Ayler Xmas (Soul What), a raucous new release recorded last year at the Hungry Brain, he’s organized a tour around the U.S. and Europe this month. The performances will feature a revolving cast of players from each locale, but as the new CD makes clear, it will be hard to top the rapport he has with his Chicago compatriots—the personnel of his long-running Ayler tribute band Witches & Devils, who not only know Williams’s improvisational ethos intimately but have helped him develop this wonderful hybrid....

There’s a striking irony to the fact that City Hall is nonagenarian documentarian Frederick Wiseman’s 45th feature. It was shot amid the Trump presidency in 2018 and 2019 and is being released in the days leading up to and after an election that will hopefully result in the infantile authoritarian’s ousting. But Wiseman, who made his first documentary, Titicut Follies, in 1967, never makes films in response to the current political climate—at least, not explicitly....

Lynda Barry’s landmark comic strip Ernie Pook’s Comeek appeared in 70 papers nationwide (including this one) during its nearly three-decade run, which started sometime in the late 70s and ended in 2008. The most beloved character to emerge from that title was spunky Marlys Mullen, a freckled, bespectacled eight-year-old with pigtails pointing in opposite directions. Loosely based on Barry‘s own childhood years, Marlys lives in a trailer park with her teenage sister Maybonne, her younger brother Freddie, and her cousins Arna and Arnold....

Local hip-hop group He Who Walks Three Ways played a big role in developing the Chicago scene in the early 90s. In 1992, cofounder Duro Wicks launched a short-lived but crucial hip-hop weekly at Lower Links, which put a spotlight on HWWTW—they were big enough to open for the likes of the Pharcyde, Arrested Development, and A Tribe Called Quest. (Lori Branch, the DJ for the four-person outfit, had already secured her own legendary status when she became the first female house DJ....

For the last few years, Republicans have puffed themselves up as defenders of free speech and opponents of cancel culture. That is—they reserved the right to cancel your culture while defending their right to say whatever they want. In 2019, Dr. Lee opined in a tweet that Trump and Dershowitz had a “shared psychosis” of “grandiosity and delusional-level impunity.” But you know how it goes. When you’re, say, a gay student protesting homophobia, you’re a snowflake....

Never have I ever objected to anything my esteemed colleague Ben Joravsky has written. Up until two weeks ago he’s been the perfect embodiment of soulful wit and journalistic pugnaciousness—always punching up, never down. Mushrooms are merely the visible fruits of vast unseen mycelial networks; threadlike structures that protect and connect the roots of plants, with the ability to warn the other growing things in the forest of impending disease and pestilence....

Who’s going to notice a breakfast biscuit next to a display case filled with Fruity Pebbles doughnuts, Snickers old-fashioned, and red velvet glazed with cream cheese frosting? Doughnut production relocated to the new, larger location earlier this summer, and though they can stand up to any in the city’s doughnut establishment—whether textured old-fashioneds encrusted with alien green pistachio, overinflated strawberry glazed, or Valrhona chocolate-iced cake doughnuts—they all do the job they were made for....

Icíar Bollaín’s Spanish drama Take My Eyes (2003) is a masterpiece of modern Spanish cinema, interweaving political and humanist concerns so closely that they seem inseparable. A lower-middle-class housewife gives her abusive husband another chance after he agrees to take part in anger-management counseling, and though the wife might seem like the more sympathetic character, Bollaín and cowriter Alicia Luna dare to present both spouses as victims of the social order (the husband comes to realize that his rage stems from his lack of social mobility and his need to maintain a traditional patriarchal household)....