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?...

“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....

Chicagoland multi-instrumentalist Liam Fagan is 18: young enough to treat emo bands who are still establishing themselves (particularly critical darlings Oso Oso) as aesthetic polestars, but also old enough to legally get the name of one of his favorite albums (the Hotelier’s Goodness) tattooed on his arm. As the mastermind and sole musician behind Park National, Fagan has figured out how to cut his own path in emo. The project’s recent debut, The Big Glad (self-released via Fagan’s P Natty Records), relies on pop-punk propulsion, glistening loop-the-loop guitars, and enough hyperactive hooks to enrapture the most distractible listener—in other words, it ticks all the boxes for the emo subcategory known as sparklepunk....

The dancers of Khecari picked as good a time as any to get off the grid. Last Thursday, two days after the presidential campaign came to an end, I made my way to Indian Boundary Park Cultural Center in Rogers Park for a pseudo-getaway called The Retreat. Upon arrival, I was asked to relinquish my phone for safekeeping and put my mind to rest for at least a few hours. I was assigned a “ranger” who’d help guide me throughout the night....

It’s no coincidence that our national political conversation continues to be toilet talk—and I don’t just mean whatever comes out of Donald Trump’s potty mouth. The headlines keep piling up over the pissing match between Republicans and Democrats regarding who can use which bathroom. It’s not an insignificant issue—but by pitching another battle in the endless culture war, our political gentry can energize their own bases without having to address all those messy economic issues that Bernie Sanders won’t stop preaching about....

Philadelphia’s Steve Gunn had made a name for himself with both his exploratory acoustic fingerstyle guitar playing and his more turbulent, noisy improvisational excursions before finding a new voice as an introspective singer-songwriter with a big sound; his songs meld lyrics that reflect a refined introspection with dusky, sometimes raucous folk rock that borders on the anthemic. In the wake of his 2016 album Eyes on the Lines (Matador) he’s been building an audience the old-fashioned way—as a road dog leading a well-oiled band....

Myles Gebert The old-fashioned diner burger at Dove’s When Dove’s Luncheonette opened last year, I was somewhat surprised to find that the alleged “luncheonette” from One Off Hospitality, located next to Big Star, has a menu that consists mainly of Mexican dishes. It wasn’t what the cassette tape of 60s soul numbers that had been distributed to local food writers had led me to expect. Mind you, One Off is the group who has a Mediterranean restaurant (Avec) that looks like a Swedish sauna, so a certain amount of cultural fusion was to be expected....

Chicago nonprofit arts programmers Homeroom coordinate the concert and recording series Physics for Listeners, which connects local composers and performers from diverse musical traditions. For the current iteration (following installments in 2010 and 2012), Homeroom worked with improvising trio ZRL (clarinetist Zachary Good, percussionist Ryan Packard, and cellist Lia Kohl) to commission ten-minute pieces by Ben Lamar Gay, Ayanna Woods, Sam Scranton, and the members of Ohmme. Reader critic Peter Margasak has said of ZRL that “it’s difficult to describe them in terms of genre—they’re interested in exploration, wherever it may take them....

Poor Hail, Caesar! The latest Coen Brothers film has had a tepid response from critics and its box office returns have been disappointing so far. The survey firm Cinemascore, typically generous to films, determined that opening-night audiences rated Hail, Caesar! a “C-“—dregs usually reserved for artsy action movies like Haywire or Killing Them Softly that tend to alienate their core audience. What accounts for this lukewarm reception? Pinko song-and-dance man Burt Gurney (Channing Tatum) is obviously a riff on Gene Kelly—a figure whose own political activity demonstrates the subtle ideological gradation of the era....

Since 2010 this invaluable Chicago ensemble directed by composer Nomi Epstein has been the city’s most stalwart advocate for post-John Cage experimental music, working at various times with text scores, indeterminacy, and other open-ended modes of composition. For this unusual concert Aperiodic joins new-music scholar Jennie Gottschalk to illustrate some of the threads from her book Experimental Music Since 1970 (Bloomsbury), an accessible survey of some of the most interesting if misunderstood through lines in new music over the last five decades....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Monday, March 28, 2016. Rod Blagojevich appeal rejected by U.S. Supreme Court The U.S. Supreme Court turned down former governor and Celebrity Apprentice contestant Rod Blagojevich’s last shot at overturning his conviction. An appellate panel of judges threw out five of the disgraced governor’s 18 criminal convictions and called for a resentencing in 2015. It’s unclear whether his 14-year prison sentence will be lightened by a U....

At the beginning of this discursive one-man show, a Silk Road Rising/Stage Left coproduction, Egyptian-American musician and storyteller Karim Nagi announces he’s taking his audience on a fanciful junket through the Arab world in order to counter the pervasive Western misrepresentations that reduce some 423 million people across 22 countries to mystical genies, exotic seductresses, or extremist terrorists—or, in Nagi’s characteristically glib yet piquant phraseology, to Aladdin, Jasmine, or Jafar. It’s an admirable goal, given the global carnage that results from the relentless othering of Arabs, but like the unwieldy tuk-tuk that’s supposed to carry us “tourists” along yet never gets put to much meaningful use, it’s difficult to know where this tour is headed....

Contemporary stories are having a welcome moment at Lyric Opera. While Dead Man Walking continues its powerful run at the Civic Opera House, a new Lyric kids’ opera, Earth to Kenzie, takes on the subject of homelessness. The 45-minute work, with music by Frances Pollock and libretto by Jessica Murphy Moo, was commissioned by Lyric for a series of local school performances (some of which were canceled during the CTU strike)....

Barbara Stanwyck and David Manners star in Capra’s The Miracle Woman, which screens at the Music Box this weekend. In the emblematic, all-American town of Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, it takes an act of divine intervention to stop a pure-hearted altruist from committing suicide. George Bailey’s struggle to remain a moral paragon in a climate of corruption and failure is presented as a Herculean effort—the film shows that without Bailey’s superhuman power the town would devolve into a modern-day Gomorrah....

The Reader‘s archive is vast and varied, going back to 1971. Every day in Archive Dive, we’ll dig through and bring up some finds. Phair delivers the musical chops as well. Her remarkably facile voice sounds soft and biting one minute, soaring and regretful a few minutes later; she’s a hormonal rocker on one song, an abstract scatter the next. If she learned one thing from Exile, it’s that a good double album needs to include reach, ambition, surprises, and an overriding sense of a journey under way....

Richard A. Chapman Firefighter alderman Nick Sposato supported the union’s donation to Mayor Emanuel. For the record, let me say this—the firefighters of Chicago have no bigger fan than yours truly. But it just gave him $25,000. Like this dude—who’s raised more than $30 million in the last four years—needs more money! But it’s almost as much money as Alderman Robert Fioretti has been able to raise in the last month....

ARTIST: Frances Taylor SHOW: Christian Scott at the Promontory on Fri 3/4

Most stand-up comedians can recall all too well the look and sound of the crowd when they’ve completely bombed. But they also thrive off an audience that cheers them and laughs along with them. So how does a comedian’s performance turn out when there’s no audience? That’s what Ian Abramson and Matt Byrne’s show Seven Minutes in Purgatory aims to discover. Originally created in Chicago, the show has since

Lucas Hnath‘s intriguing 2014 drama The Christians, now receiving its Chicago premiere in a finely acted production at Steppenwolf Theatre, is unlike any play I’ve ever seen about religion. There’s no nun boldly overstepping her authority to expose a suspected pedophile priest; no charismatic hypocritical preacher bilking the gullible faithful; no philandering phonies or self-hating homos, preaching traditional family values while pursuing their own illicit lusts. Instead, The Christians concerns a basic question that might seem better suited to a scholarly lecture: Is God’s love for humanity so great that it encompasses everyone, not just Christians?...