This Friday and Saturday at midnight, the Music Box Theatre will screen Lips of Blood (1975), the first in a three-film series devoted to French exploitation director Jean Rollin (1938-2010). Upcoming are The Iron Rose (1973) on March 9 and 10, and Fascination (1979) on March 30 and 31. All three films come highly recommended to purveyors of the macabre, sexploitation freaks, and fans of Jacques Rivette, another French director who specialized in opaque, dreamlike narratives....

Imagine a world to come when mysterious green people subject whites to Jim Crow segregation and a multiracial duo of time travelers launches an uprising. Or conjure a view of the 1960s when race riots became the source of children’s inventions or romantic entreaties. Chicago’s African American cartoonists have created such tales for decades, and their often neglected work is now receiving wider attention. “Chicago Comics: 1960s to Now” is on view through October 3 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago at 220 E....

Last Friday, Chicago’s City Council overwhelmingly voted to rename Lake Shore Drive after Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, the Black trading post operator who, along with his Potawatomi wife Kitihawa, established the first recorded permanent settlement in the area in the late 1700s, which eventually grew into our current metropolis. I had previously advocated for the change. Media commentary showed a similar, if somewhat less pronounced, racial divide. Black journalists Laura Washington and Mary Mitchell from the Sun-Times, and Michael Romain from the Wednesday Journal wrote in favor of the name change....

This Is Modern Art, a provocative play about graffiti artists, ran for a few weeks early last year as a Steppenwolf for Young Adults production. The play, by Idris Goodwin and Kevin Coval, was inspired by an action in 2010, when young graffiti artists working at night in a snowstorm spray-painted a 50-foot mural on the new modern wing of the Art Institute. (It was removed.) Weiss is served up straight....

I haven’t always been gentle when I’ve written about Bill Kim’s food. I’ve long been of the (immensely unpopular) opinion that the former fine-dining chef behind the immensely popular BellyQ (and erstwhile Urban Belly and Belly Shack) tends to oversaturate his food with too many disparate influences. That being said, this was a busy week, so I wanted something simple, settling on grilled skirt steak and asparagus with a gochuchang-based sauce....

In the two years since she left Chicago, Megan Gailey has boosted her recognition with shows across the country, a spot on Conan, and a starring role in MTV’s prank show Ladylike. Now she’s returning to the city where she cut her teeth to headline the Comedy Exposition. We talked with the stand-up about her first time onstage, drunk Chicago comics, and reading YouTube comments. Oh my god, I wore a vest, which I look back on like, “What was I doing?...

When the Reader‘s music staff launched the Listener almost a year ago, we hoped that you, the great reading public, might come to see it as a weekly way to hear from your imaginary friends who always have a new band or record they’re excited to tell you about. To explain why I’m excited about this week’s record, I have to confess to a long-standing bias against electronic dance music—perhaps an unseemly attitude for a music editor to hold....

Versatility has long been drummer Charles Rumback’s calling card, but his empathic, elastic range—which has included feverish free jazz, elegant pop-rock, and exploratory groove music—and commitment to ensemble play have sometimes hampered his name recognition. In spite of that, Rumback’s rumbling, post-Paul Motian sound is easily recognizable, and I’m glad he seems to have found a working band that lets it resonate more clearly. His recent Tag Book (Ears & Eyes), the second album he’s released in 2017 with his ruminative trio with pianist Jim Baker and New York bassist John Tate, reinforces his complementary development as composer and leader....

The ten albums Darius Jones has made as a leader or coleader since 2009 reveal an artist who can’t be pinned down. As part of the collective Little Women, the New York-based alto saxophonist combined extended instrumental techniques, postpunk rhythms, and a ritual demeanor reminiscent of martial arts practice to create devastating concert experiences. The compositions he’s played on his trio and quartet albums for the Aum Fidelity label steer closer to postbop jazz forms, with mercurial changes in mood and structures anchored by bluff and bluesy horn playing....

It’s been eight years since bass clarinetist Jason Stein dropped Three Kinds of Happiness (Not Two), the best and most agile recording thus far by Locksmith Isidore, his trio with bassist Jason Roebke and drummer Mike Pride, but the group has hardly been inactive. When Stein’s half sister, comedian Amy Schumer, enlisted him as an opening act for her international appearances throughout 2015-2017, he brought along the trio—which emphasized its ability to swing more than its knack for skronk....

Local punks Absolutely Not have never been the type of band to release accessible music. The first releases they started putting out in 2013 showcased fairly standard garage punk, but they topped everything off with a serious dose of spazzy harshness. On their brand-new third album, Problematic (No Trend), the band—vocalist and guitarist Donnie Moore, vocalist and keyboardist Madison Moore, drummer Santiago Guerrero, and Meat Wave front man Chris Sutter newly appointed on second guitar—take the eerie dissonance they hinted at on their previous releases and push it to the brink, hammering out obtuse, disjointed, paranoia-inducing, sci-fi new-wave punk, and cramming more bad energy than should be legal into two-and-a-half-minute songs....

Seven years ago, the rap world’s spotlight affixed itself on the first wave of drill with such intensity I wouldn’t have blamed anyone for thinking it’d be permanent. But the attention began to move on sometime between when Keef dropped Finally Rich in December 2012 and when he started serving 60 days for violating his probation in January 2013. The couple dozen rappers who helped make drill’s first wave a phenomenon have since evolved as artists, and many of them have grown out of anything resembling drill’s icy, violent image....

Editorial cartoonists don’t do high-minded critiques. They’re paid to take shots, cheap shots even, shots that make a lot out of a little. Remember the mileage Herblock used to get just from drawing Nixon’s five o’clock shadow? The earpiece question has been advanced by, among others, the Drudge Report, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, and Donald Trump Jr. Yet skeptics have the upper hand, their case bolstered by photo blowups of Clinton’s suspect ear taken at the same event....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Monday, September 26, 2016. The impact of one suicide News organizations rarely report on individual suicides unless the victim is a public figure. But after Sun-Times reporter Frank Main witnessed Chicagoan Kendra Smith jump from a West Loop apartment building in May, he felt compelled to explore the story. Main wrote a very moving piece about Smith, the emergency responders, the witnesses, her family and friends, and the effect her decision had on all of them....

Courtesy of the band’s Tumblr Oshwa If 2015 hasn’t exactly been kind to Chicago so far (nothing like subzero frigidity to ring in the new year), it at least comes with the promise of a whole batch of new music to anticipate. Chicago winters are the perfect time to take a break from playing shows and hole up in the studio; lucky for us, some of the city’s most exciting artists have been doing just that....

Sex, drugs, cursing, violence, New York City, the 1970s, mirrors smudged with coke residue, the Brill Building, a label acquisition, racial epithets, booze, broads, orgies, cooked books, deals made under the table, the enticing thought of Ray Romano vacuuming up lines of coke with his architecturally handsome nose, the sound of a skull cracking, cash stuffed in envelopes and record sleeves, Brooklyn accents, murder, a punk brawl, a trashed living room, and, finally, rock ‘n’ roll....

A historic 125-year-old home in Riverside Lawn, described by former owner Judy Koessel as “waiting to be saved,” burned down early Thursday morning. But the house was one of nearly two dozen located in a floodplain, and in 2016 the Cook County Land Bank Authority slated it for demolition. The land bank was required to conduct an architectural survey before destroying the homes, and Koessel’s home, at 3744 Stanley Ave....

Anna Romina Guevarra is the founding director and associate professor of Global Asian Studies at the University of Illinois-Chicago and a Public Voices Fellow of the OpEd Project. She is an award-winning author on race, labor, and migration, and an expert witness on asylum cases. In the aftermath of the pandemic, state and federal agencies classified essential services—and workers—needed to maintain critical operations and functions and ensure that Americans have the basic necessities for everyday functioning and survival....

When Chicago Quarterly Review was launched in 1994 it aspired to live up to its name and hasn’t exactly succeeded—that is, it’s published 19 issues in those 21 years. But founder Syed Haider tells me he’s picked up the pace—the latest issue is the third in a year’s time. “Suddenly we are becoming what we should have been—some kind of quarterly,” says Haider. Are other publishers taking notes? Pay all Contribute to the expenses out of your own pocket—as Haider and his coeditor, Elizabeth McKenzie, do— and the agonies of capitalization fall away....

Cold Specks’ Ladan Hussein (aka Al Spx) is one of a number of artists, among them FKA Twigs, Kelala, Dawn Richard, and Frank Ocean, who combine R&B and rock into uncategorizable pop—though her particular version of it has been characterized as “doom soul” or quirky indie soul in the past. The Somali-Canadian performer’s latest album, Fool’s Paradise, sounds less odd than her earlier material, in part because it’s so perfect. Hussein’s new arrangements are less fussy than before, their electronic elements seamlessly incorporated into a series of dreamy midtempo tunes worthy of Sadé, and also like Sadé, above it all floats Hussein’s marvelous, insinuating voice....