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In this Black Panther moment, which has tapped into and expanded the recent interest in Afro-Futurism, and inspired by the screening of Haile Gerima’s 1993 film Sankofa on Monday by Doc Films and by last week’s passing of acclaimed Burkinabe director Idrissa Ouédraogo, we are focusing this week on five key African films from Senegal, Mali, Mauritania, and Burkina Faso. Yaaba Idrissa Ouedraogo’s second feature (1989), from Burkina Faso, focuses on a young boy (Noufou Ouedraogo) and his female cousin (Roukietou Barry) as they befriend an old woman in their village (Fatimata Sanga) who’s treated as an outcast and accused of being a witch....

Welcome to the Reader’s new cannabis column To Be Blunt. We’re here to answer your canna questions with the help of budtenders, attorneys, medical practitioners, chefs, researchers, legislators, and patient care advocates. Send your queries to tobeblunt@chicagoreader.com. We’ve enlisted Larry Mishkin, a local attorney who specializes in cannabis law, to tackle this one for us. His response, which has been edited for length and clarity, is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be construed as legal advice....

When rappers began to gravitate towards singing at the beginning of this decade, Kirk Randle, better known as Kirko Bangz, infused his vocals with the spirit of his hometown, Houston, and the city’s influence is all over his breakout 2011 single, “Drank in My Cup.” The song’s title is an obvious reference to the recreational abuse of cough syrup popularized in Houston hip-hop, and its glacial pace and resonant melody are steeped in the southern swang of H-Town rap....

All her life, DePaul professor Kathleen Rooney was a fan of Belgian painter René Magritte. A writer herself, Rooney describes Magritte as “a writer’s painter. His work is very literary and poetic.” In July 2014, her friend and fellow faculty member Eric Plattner suggested they go see “Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-1938,” an exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago. Little did she know that this trip to the museum was the beginning of a project that would consume the next two years of her life....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Friday, December 9, 2016. Have a great weekend! Starbucks will test stand-alone Italian bakery in the West Loop Starbucks is planning to open the first U.S. location of its chain of Italian bakeries, Princi, in the West Loop, according to Eater Chicago. Starbucks already has Princi locations in Italy and London, and plans to open U.S. restaurants in Chicago, then New York and Seattle....

Chicago indie singer-songwriter Nayla Jungheim knows that putting her own needs first is the best defense against a cruel and indifferent world. She made her new debut album, the lively and big-hearted This Might Be Healing (self-released digitally and available on cassette via Solidarity Club), using largely acoustic instrumentation as a retort to people in her circle who consider such stripped-down music to be trad, staid, and unremarkable. Jungheim handily demolishes that criticism: cuts such as “Note to Self” and “Any Questions?...

Editor’s note: During the play, one of the characters uses a racial slur. Although the offensive language came directly from the script, we should have not printed it. We have removed the offensive word. We apologize. The author has written a statement. Or rather, not until Mr. Prentice’s pointed outburst late in act two, during which he paints for his son a horrifying picture of the life he’ll face. At best, white America will take credit for his research....

Let me preface my review of David Bowie’s new Blackstar by saying that there’s no way I wasn’t going to like this album. I am so enamored with Bowie that if he released a literal heaping pile of garbage, I would defend it to the death as a work of creative genius even as the stench threatened to knock me unconscious. But luckily for me (and for the world, really), Blackstar is anything but trash....

When writer and actor Erin Diamond steps onstage at Uptown Underground, she’s spray-tanned, her eyes piled with mascara, squinting as if she’s in desperate need of prescription lenses. She wears a gold-sequined gown that blends in with the gold-leaf design on the maroon pillows and cushions on the thronelike seats onstage. In Christmas: By Melania, Diamond subverts Mrs. Trump’s obsession with opulence by playing her as the host of a chintzy TV Christmas special, the kind emceed by Bob Hope or the Osmonds during the 1970s and ’80s....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Thursday, February 18, 2016.

ARTIST: Bill Connors SHOW: Facs, Dim, and Ethers at the Empty Bottle on Fri 3/30 MORE INFO: instagram.com/billconnors

At the beginning of the pandemic, I became mildly obsessed with a video of Limp Bizkit playing a Moscow venue in February 2020. I wasn’t drawn to the performance so much as to the sight of front man Fred Durst, who’d been an emblem of white male millennials’ bottomless teenage angst at the turn of the century—like a nu-metal Santa Claus, he wore a gray-and-white beard radiating from his chin. Nothing else has quite crystallized for me how much time has passed since Limp Bizkit could compete with blockbuster boy bands and sell albums by the millions....

On a recent Saturday, a crowd of about 400 people, mostly Bridgeport natives, has gathered in a large skybox at White Sox park. The place is dark except for a Jumbotron, which is illuminated with a portrait of the late stand-up comedian Pat Brice. Tonight is a tribute show in honor of Brice’s 40th birthday and a fund-raiser for the families of Chicago comics Steve O. Harvey, who lost a bout with cancer in September 2015, and Prescott Tolk, whose father, an Uber driver in New York, was recently killed in an altercation with a man carrying a hockey stick....

Sun-Times Media Andrew Patner The death of Andrew Patner at 55 is terrible news. Wasn’t it just yesterday or the day before that I was chronicling his dispute with WBEZ over what Patner considered the indiscriminate use of jagoff on its airwaves? “Is there any line of language not to cross?” Patner (a cultural commentator on rival WFMT) wondered in e-mail to his “WBEZ friends.” Patner had done some journalism, but at the time he was in law school and trying to figure out his life....

Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place. The Ethnic Heritage Ensemble recorded this live album in 1987. El’Zabar is the only member remaining from that time period.

D aniel Kraus remembers the exact moment the idea hit him. He was 15 years old, and he was standing on a tennis court in Fairfield, Iowa, where he grew up. “The extent of the idea,” he says now, “was the Creature from the Black Lagoon is put in a lab; a janitor finds him and decides to break him out and put him in her tub. And that was it for many years....

One day in the late 1990s, local birder Leslie Borns visited Montrose Beach, as she often did, and noticed lakeshore rush, a grassy plant that hadn’t been seen in Chicago in more than 50 years. Excited by what this could mean, Borns contacted the park district to suggest they stop pulling the plants from the sand on the eastern edge of the beach and let whatever pops up continue growing....

Photographer Rick Majewski covered the 40th annual Muertos de la Risa on Saturday, November 2, 2019, in Pilsen. The longest-running Dia de los Muertos celebration in the city honors the lives of those passed with a procession, offerings, performances, and face painting. v Día de los Muertos 2019

In 1989, I read an article in the New Yorker that changed my professional life—”The Journalist and the Murderer”—Janet Malcolm’s monumental takedown of journalists. After reading her article, I vowed to be upfront with my subjects—reading my article to them before it was printed, if that’s what they wanted. I made that offer throughout the 90s to profile subjects ranging from Bill Ayers to Norm Van Lier. Actually, Hersh and Caro are as different from each other as a hare from a tortoise....