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Michelle Sinclair (left) with Maya Rudolph and Joaquin Phoenix in Inherent Vice An unexpected standout among the star-studded cast of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice is Michelle Sinclair, who until 2012 performed in adult videos under the name Belladonna. Sinclair plays Clancy Charlock, sister of the neo-Nazi biker whose mysterious death kicks the plot into gear. She appears sometime in the middle of the film to provide stoner private eye Doc Sportello with some inside information and share a canister of laughing gas....

Irma Enriquez, owner and operator of Humboldt Park restaurant La Encantada, is hoping for a better year. The financial blow has been so severe that Enriquez changed La Encantada’s business number to her personal cell phone number to cut back costs on paying multiple phone bills. Prior to the reintroduction of indoor dining in late January, dine-in establishments faced the challenge of seating customers in a way that both complied with the city’s COVID mitigations and protected customers from the harsh Chicago winter....

Chicago in Tune is a difficult festival to describe, since it includes basically all live music happening in the city from August 19 till September 19. How that looks to you depends heavily on which shows are on your radar. The Reader has provided you with a number of assists: a show calendar spanning the entire month; lists of gospel, jazz, house, and blues concerts; and these roundups by genre, compiled by Reader staff and freelancers with special expertise in each area....

Sixteen months ago off-duty Chicago police officer Joseph Treacy and police sergeant Thomas Derouin shot and killed 25-year-old Joshua Beal on the corner of 111th and Troy in the Mount Greenwood neighborhood. The shooting was the culmination of a chaotic confrontation between officers and members of Beal’s family who were in a motorcade leaving Mount Hope Cemetery after a funeral for Beal’s cousin. The shooting—which happened in broad daylight in front of dozens of witnesses—immediately became a lightning rod for the rancor over police misconduct that had enveloped the city since the release of the Laquan McDonald video just a year prior....

When the Obama presidency was young I used to get email almost every day on behalf of Terry Lakin and his quest. The link to the Maryland lawyer, Tracy Fair, leads to a belt-and-suspenders case for declaring the Obama presidency completely bogus. On the one hand, he was born in Kenya. On the other, it doesn’t matter where he was born because he’s not a “natural born citizen”—thanks to his Kenyan father....

There are many ways to honor great writers—award them prizes, name streets for them, or best of all, buy and read their books. The dude’s a little, oh, I wouldn’t say kooky. More like obsessive. And I say this with all due respect as someone kooky enough to spend 15 years (and counting) writing about TIFs. As I said, I’ve spent the better part of several nights reading through them, and I got a little dizzy from staring at the screen....

At the southeast corner of 43rd Street and Langley Avenue, the ghosts are still trying to speak. It’s an unremarkable corner in a rebounding niche of Bronzeville, occupied by a blandly newish subsidized town-house apartment building. But in the late 1960s this corner was the site of the nation’s most renowned African-American mural. Over the years, I’ve heard stories about people coming to the corner to visit, thinking that there’s a plaque or a marker there....

Founded five years ago and recipient of a 2019 Ruth Page Award, the Chicago Dance History Project has steadily built a digital archive of original and collected research documenting theatrical dance in Chicago, hosted and produced numerous public events exploring topics in Chicago dance, and amassed a large collection of performance footage and other historical materials. “We’ve been working with a sense of urgency to capture as many dance histories of Chicago as we can, while we still can, through recorded oral history interviews primarily....

The first thing Blake Karlson did to promote his record label Chicago Research was head to what he calls “the most haunted cemetery in the United States.” Hidden in Rubio Woods Forest Preserve in the southwest suburbs, Bachelor’s Grove Cemetery has been a nexus for spooky apparitions since at least the 1950s, according to Matt Hucke and Ursula Bielski’s 1999 book, Graveyards of Chicago. Witnesses have reported seeing flashing lights, a house that would appear and disappear without a trace, a man with two heads, mysterious hooded figures, and a woman cloaked in white....

Dear Chicago Theater Community, Another loss for young professionals who are just entering the theater community is the opportunity to see Chicago theater at its finest. With the tumultuous political situation and a decade’s worth of struggle, it truly felt that this was the season of making bold statements. Directors from Lili-Anne Brown (School Girls) to Wardell Julius Clark (Kill Move Paradise), to Tara Branham (Little Women), to Brian Balcom (Teenage Dick)—each of their plays opened up gateways for conversation for people from all walks of life: POC, femme, queer, disabled....

The cover of Surf Last night Donnie Trumpet & the Social Experiment—the band he plays in with Chance the Rapper, Nate Fox, and Peter Cottontale—dropped their highly anticipated album Surf for free via iTunes. Chance is the most prominent member of the Social Experiment, which served as his backing band when he toured on his fantastic 2013 mixtape Acid Rap, and while his distinctly coiled raps, yips, and tender coos are all over Surf, the album is fronted by Donnie Trumpet, aka former Kids These Days trumpet player Nico Segal....

UPDATE: The date of the blackout and the meeting at the Laugh Factory has been changed to Sunday, January 31 in order to accommodate as many female comics as possible. As an alternative, Women in Comedy founder Victoria Elena Nones is encouraging female comics to gather at the Laugh Factory in Lakeview for a panel discussion lead by Kaethe Morris Hoffer, executive director of the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation....

Ready your picnic blankets and folding chairs, because the warm weather brings with it a host of outdoor film screenings. Between the Chicago Park District‘s Movies in the Parks series (which began earlier this month) and the Millennium Park Summer Film Series (which begins Tuesday, June 21), there are nearly 300 free screenings throughout the summer. To help you keep track of the glut of alfresco cinema, here’s a roundup of the movies playing this week:...

A group of unmarried women decide to encloister together on an idyllic estate inherited by their ringleader, Lady Happy. No men are allowed on the premises at any time. The women’s chambers are lush and seasonally thematic. There are fresh flowers everywhere and the wine never stops flowing. Only the choicest cuts of meat are served. Every room has the perfect selfie mirror. And again—no men allowed. “We’re gathering together as a community to tell some really important and impactful stories and celebrate the narratives of the unheard and overlooked throughout history,” says Andrew Coopman, a Seattle-based storytelling interdisciplinary artist, who directed The Convent of Pleasure for Ghostlight....

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?...

Welcome to the Reader‘s weekday news briefing. Progressive Democrats targeting Congressman Dan Lipinski in primary Longtime Chicago congressman Dan Lipinski is being targeted by the progressive wing of the Democratic party in the 2018 primary. New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Gloria Steinem, the Human Rights Campaign, and numerous organizations have endorsed Lipinski’s opponent, businesswoman Marie Newman. “Dan Lipinski has a real, formidable challenger like he’s never had before. The environment is different....

By the time Chicago rapper Juice WRLD died in December at age 21, he’d already made a gigantic impact on hip-hop. His meteoric rise started when he was just a teenager with the 2017 single “Lucid Dreams,” a landmark in the burgeoning “emo rap” genre, which exploded after he rerecorded it for his 2018 debut full-length, Goodbye & Good Riddance. The whole album was a stone cold masterpiece; Juice sang some of the catchiest melodies ever put to tape over slick, ethereal trap beats, weaving in poetry about self-doubt, isolation, and drug use....

Little Big have all the nuance of a Las Vegas motel sign, but that’s the point. They’re a Russian rave band that have employed jackhammer drums, earthquake-inducing bass drops, and synths that could soundtrack for Sonic the Hedgehog on ecstasy to spoof Russian culture and dance-music cliches. The music on their two 2018 Antipositive EPs (SBA Music Publishing/Warner Music Russia) relentlessly bludgeon the listener—if you’ve ever made fun of teenage American EDM fans, these songs are likely the sound you imagined when you did it....

Few recordings transport me directly to a time and place like Dusted, the 1987 album by foundational New York noise-rock band Live Skull. Founded in 1982 by guitarists Tom Paine and Mark C., Live Skull were a buzz saw of guitar-led postpunk that combined art-rocker sensibilities with leather-jacket sneer, almost perfectly encapsulating the early-80s Lower Manhattan scene that birthed them. Dusted came fourth among the seven studio releases of the band’s initial incarnation, before one too many lineup changes and a lack of commercial success led to their breakup in 1990....

During her rousing afternoon set at last summer’s Pitchfork Music Festival, Chicago soul and gospel legend Mavis Staples claimed she was thinking of running for president to help get rid of “the orange face up in the office.” Let’s be frank—she wouldn’t even have to ask for Gossip Wolf’s vote! On Friday, Staples dropped “All in It Together,” a slippery, Stones-y new single she wrote with longtime collaborator Jeff Tweedy that benefits the Senior Viral Response program of Chicago nonprofit My Block My Hood My City, which aims to get hand sanitizer, groceries, and other necessities to isolated members of the city’s aging population during the COVID-19 pandemic....