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Jaimie Branch’s 2017 debut LP, Fly or Die, heralded the arrival of an already mature talent. While it wasn’t a secret that she’s a superb trumpeter, it was her chops as a composer and bandleader that made the record stand out. She devised bold themes and galvanic grooves that inspired a band of elder musicians, all fellow ex-Chicagoans, to outdo themselves. (Branch is now based in Brooklyn, but she lived here till 2012....

Courtesy of Priority Male Ennui‘s reissue Back in 2012, local labels Galactic Archive (run by Steve “Plastic Crimewave” Krakow) and Priority Male (operated by Matthew Hord of Running) teamed up to reissue Machines That Kill People, the long-lost 1983 debut of south-side art-rock legends Ono. The bizarre, noisy, and theatrical band blew minds in the 80s, but were all but forgotten by 2007 when they were resurrected by Krakow. They’ve since firmly planted themselves as the focal point of the weirdo-Chicago-underground-rock scene, reinventing themselves over and over and constantly incorporating young blood into the lineup—a roster which now boasts experimental musicians like Brett Naucke and Ben Billington as part of the team....

Won Kim likes surprises, so he only knows three of the soups on deck for Monday’s Souper Bowl 3 Peat at the Co-Prosperity Sphere: minestrone, turkey pozole, and potato leek. But those are but drops in stockpot at the third iteration of the Kimski chef’s community soup series which will feature more than 30 soups from chefs and amateurs alike including Food Chain favorites such as Aaron McKay of the Chicago Board Game Cafe, Brian Fisher of Entente, Margaret Pak of Thattu, Sarah Kaleta of Kimski, Nick Jirasek (Young American), Kevin Hickey (Duck Inn), Rafael Esparza (Finom), and many more....

I doubt that a more entertaining film will play Chicago this summer than The Fate of Lee Khan (1973), which screens three times this week at the Gene Siskel Film Center in a new digital restoration. Lee Khan may not be the greatest work by director King Hu (that would be either Dragon Inn or A Touch of Zen), but it contains so many pleasurable moments that it may be his most satisfying to watch....

It was July 1966, and Chicago architect Bertrand Goldberg was celebrating his 53rd birthday at the construction site of his latest development. Although not yet complete, the four concrete towers of the Raymond Hilliard Homes emerging just east of Chinatown already had what would come to be Goldberg’s signature bulbous, organic shapes, reminiscent of corncobs or honeycombs. Goldberg, likely dressed in the gold suspenders, speckled shirt, and gold sneakers he often wore for such occasions, had the construction site decorated with Japanese lanterns strung up on bulldozers and other heavy equipment, and set trays of canapes out on two-by-fours....

Michael Gebert Pulled pork sandwich at Dinosaur Bar-B-Que This is not a review of Dinosaur Bar-B-Que. And so is Dinosaur Bar-B-Que. The brick building with faux-faded painted signs is designed in full faux honky-tonk. (Hauxnky-tauxnk?) Which, frankly, so was Bub City 20 years ago, and is again now in River North. But Green Street Smoked Meats has set a new bar for fauxing honky-tonks; it’s immersive and gritty, and it feels like an episode of True Blood could break out at any moment....

The Facs formula has always been stark minimalism. On their first two albums, the Chicago trio—currently drummer Noah Leger, guitarist-singer Brian Case, and bassist Alianna Kalaba—built every track on tense rhythms, simple bass throbs, barely-there guitar plinking, and direct spoken-word vocals. It was like they were casting moods more than writing songs. The formula worked to great effect, both live and on record: their music was spooky, hard-hitting, and efficient, with no note or tone ever falling out of place....

Brian Jackson/Sun-Times Media Parks officials and the audience watched a video presentation at a Park District hearing on the Obama Presidential Library. I thought about going incognito to Tuesday night’s big south-side public hearing on the Obama Presidential Library, wearing an Inspector Clouseau mustache and hat, and speaking in a fractured French accent. As far as I can tell, their attitude toward the west side’s a little like Mayor Rahm’s—they know it’s there, but they don’t want anything to do with it....

For most of my life, Animal Crossing was a tiny and indescribable world made just for me. It was reserved for the turquoise Nintendo DS original that I got for my eighth birthday, the now-clunky-feeling device that hosted a sticky and peeling Nintendogs decal across the front and served me throughout my childhood. Playing Animal Crossing: Wild World on that thing was a daily routine during my heaviest DS-playing years, and I was always astonished at how deeply I cared about my weird, anthropomorphic digital town....

I’m not going to see the Misfits reunion. I’m sure the 13-year-old me (or the 23- or even 43-year-old me) would bean current me with a skull for saying this, but it’s tragically true. I’ve spent thousands of hours listening to the Misfits’ sublimely perfect horror-hardcore incantations, and despite the bad blood between front man Glenn Danzig and bassist Jerry Only (who won a bitter legal battle to revive a hokey, Danzig-free version of the band in the mid-90s), I’ve always dreamed of seeing the original lineup reunited....

The songs on the first three records Toronto singer-songwriter Afie Jurvanen has made under the name Bahamas have slowly lodged themselves into my brain by stealth, thanks to his understated production, seductive melodies, and crafty arrangements. That’s changed with his new album Earthtones (Brushfire/Republic). It’s not that the tunes are any less catchy or the sound of the record less artful than its predecessors, but he’s frontloaded them with a more extroverted vocal presence and a slinky R&B vibe that’s previously only lurked deep in the background....

Savage Love Live at Denver’s Oriental Theater last week was epic. But we couldn’t get to all the audience questions during the show, so I’m going to race through as many that went unanswered as I can in this week’s column . . . A: Judging by how many people tell me they’re having a hard time finding sex-positive, kink-positive, open-positive, and poly-positive therapists, I would definitely file “sex-positive therapist” under “world needs more of....

Often stage narratives about LGBTQ people use stories of familial rejection as their anchors, but the beauty of Southern Comfort is in its centering of trans love and queer joy. Vile parents lurk on the periphery, but this play is not about them. It’s never been about them. A bluegrass musical based on the award-winning documentary, Southern Comfort gets its Chicago premiere with Pride Films and Plays under the direction of JD Caudill, with North Homeward starring as Robert Eads, a trans man from Toccoa, Georgia, who has been disregarded by a transphobic health-care system and now faces terminal ovarian cancer....

Though advertised as an adaption of William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale by Evan Jackson (who also directs), this production by Idle Muse Theatre is, for all practical purposes, a fairly faithful, if slimmed-down, version of Shakespeare’s play with a couple of his sonnets thrown in for good measure. Jackson’s simple, elegant production is well suited to the intimacy of the Edge Theater’s performing space. As in the original, there is a major shift in tone halfway through the tale, from somber psychological drama to lighthearted comedy, as the story turns from King Leontes, whose pathological jealousy leads to his wife’s death, to a romance that blossoms between his exiled daughter and a handsome prince....

Los Angeles-based sludge outfit Big Business have taken a lot of forms over their 15 years of existence. Started in Seattle as the dirgey metal duo of Karp bassist Jared Warren and Murder City Devils drummer Coady Willis, Big Business eventually started inviting the occasional guitarist into the mix to beef up their already beefy sound—at one point they even added two, transforming into a full-on four-piece doom band. Beginning in 2006, Warren and Willis also held down the prestigious title of “Melvins Rhythm Section” during the decade-long run of that venerable band’s double-drummer lineup....

When there’s background music at a yoga class in Chicago, it’s usually a Ravi Shankar raga, hotel-lobby-style acid jazz, or New Age crap from Windham Hill Records. But Sara Strother, an instructor at Bucktown yoga studio Yogaview, does things a little differently. For “Living Loving Yoga,” a class that was held on Thursday, May 5, she set her instruction to the music of Led Zeppelin, giving students an opportunity to rock out while doing asanas (poses and stretches)....

Darling Shear is a mover and shaker—literally. The Chicago-born choreographer produces movement-oriented pieces that are closely tied to healing from trauma. Trained in ballet, modern, jazz, and African dance, Shear ties in styles of burlesque and contemporary movement that includes intense emotion, bare feet, and crossing the barrier between audience and dancer. In the piece Querida, first performed at Links Hall in November 2018, the artist opens up about personal experiences and how movement can regenerate, soften, and disrupt our ways of navigating the past....

Liz Lauren Axis of evil, Little Foxes style A few Sundays ago, while we were waiting for a matinee to start, I had the pleasure of listening to the unvarnished commentary of the elderly man on my right as he flipped through the program. He made some remarks about the photos and credits of the cast, and then he reached an ad for the Goodman’s new production of Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes....

Picture James Dean riding a Divvy bike instead of a motorcycle. You can’t without snickering, can you? That’s because I, you, and every other human being on earth looks dorky in the clunky-ass saddle of one. The powder-blue cruisers were designed to evoke Chicago’s starry flag. But they’re more like the dad jeans of bicycles—which is ironic considering the incredibly cool origins of the community bike-share program. Two years later, Provo pitched a more serious plan....

LGBTQ sketch-comedy group GayCo put on its first revue, Whitney Houston, We Have a Problem, at the Second City in 1996. The Reader‘s Mary Shen Barnridge wrote that it kept its “focus tight and its humor accessible to audiences straight and gay, in the know or out of touch.” The performance was born out of a comedy workshop created after Second City administrative director Ed Garza discovered the word “fag” scrawled across the wall in one of the training-center classrooms....