I’d hoped to make it through my life without hearing a host of A Prairie Home Companion break out in a rap, but with the new Punch Brothers album, All Ashore (Nonesuch) that desire has been shattered. Toward the end of the second song, “The Angel of Doubt,” mandolinist, singer, and inheritor of Garrison Keillor’s maligned throne Chris Thile switches from a sweet falsetto to a wooden, hopelessly ofay rap cadence....

Kevin Hart and Ice Cube in Ride Along “The death of Hollywood is Mel Brooks and special effects,” Joseph L. Mankiewicz once said. “If Mel Brooks had come up in my day he wouldn’t have qualified to be a busboy.” As much as Brooks makes me laugh, I understand why Mankiewicz singled him out as a target for bile. The writer-director of A Letter to Three Wives approached film comedy with the same literacy and formal ambition he brought to social drama (some of his early producing credits included Fritz Lang’s Fury and Frank Borzage’s Three Comrades)....

HBO Justin Theroux is an embattled police chief in a town full of embattled people. A mass tragedy can bring people together, and it can just as easily tear people apart. The show then jumps ahead to three years after the disappearances, which, to my recollection, is where the book began; I suppose that in adapting it to a visual medium like TV, the temptation to offer a glimpse at the actual tragedy in question was too great to just move into its somewhat distant aftermath....

Susan Messer McBride was wiping clay off her hands when she began talking about feminism in the age of Donald Trump. In the past McBride, an artist and educator for decades, wasn’t very politically motivated. But that’s changed since the election. The Chicago show was one of more than 40 that have taken place since January of this year—the first in New York City—with dozens more planned across the U.S. and Europe, according to the Nasty Women Exhibition website....

A first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. “We’re trained to notice the difference between things from a very young age. Most people feel a lot of confidence in their ability to tell things apart: ‘That’s a banana; that’s a kiwi.’ People feel about gender performance the same way. And when people are confused, it makes them feel like they’ve been tricked.

There’s an old adage: The Kurds have no friends but the mountains. Rojava is a complete inversion of the nearby Islamic State in deed and law. In Rojava, women fight alongside men and are equal in both status and power, radical democracy plays out in the streets, and environmental protection is enshrined in law. The Connecticut-size patch of land far north of Aleppo has flourished as a secular oasis amid the chaos of the Syrian conflict that has left an estimated 500,000 people dead....

In the 90s, Bogotá bassist and producer Simón Mejia was strongly influenced by Sidestepper, a British and Colombian collective that combined electronic music with salsa and cumbia rhythms. He’s been following a similar blueprint with his band Bomba Estéreo since 2005, and the formula hasn’t gotten old yet. That’s in no small part thanks to Mejia’s incendiary collaborator Li Saumet, who sings and raps with tireless, infectious grit. The band’s most recent release, Live in Dublin (Polen), captures the butt-swiveling, arm-waving rush of their performances, with loose-limbed drumming from Andrés Zea and stinging wah-wah guitar from Jose Castillo vying for attention with Mejia’s joyfully cheesy synth lines....

Julia Thiel Named for its location—near the intersection of Grand and Ogden—the G&O Tavern sits just a couple blocks from its sister bar, the Aberdeen Tap. It’s more upscale than the Aberdeen, which offers pretty straightforward bar fare like sandwiches, wings, tater tots, and a good selection of draft beer. Oddly, the only beer that’s consistently on tap at G&O is Coors Banquet, though there are three other taps that have a rotating selection of craft beer, and quite a few bottles....

This is the story of a Chicago theater Christmas miracle. It’s also the story of how the Agency Theater Collective got the cab for its production of Hellcab, Will Kern’s play about a cabbie on Christmas Eve. “It was perfect,” Austin says. Well, almost. It wasn’t drivable. It smelled like something—perhaps many somethings—had died in it. And the asking price was $2,000—way over budget for the tiny Agency. Touhy is still miffed about that....

Ladrones, a Mexican heist comedy that opened in multiplexes this past weekend, is being advertised all over town, though for audiences unfamiliar with Mexican cinema and TV the film is shrouded in mystery. The distributor (Pantelion Films, a partnership between Lionsgate Entertainment and Grupo Televisa) didn’t alert any English-language press outlets about a preview screening in Chicago, leading one to assume that they previewed it here only for the Spanish-language press....

Kent Burnside, My World Is So Cold (Lucky 13) Kent Burnside’s grandfather, the late R.L. Burnside, spent most of his life playing raw, single-­chord “trance blues” in jukes around his hometown of Holly Springs, Mississippi. Like any self-respecting son (or grandson) of the blues, Burnside remains true to his lineage while blazing his own trail: on his debut album, My World Is So Cold, he duplicates R.L.’s distinctive style with almost eerie accuracy, reinforcing it with tough, bass-heavy bombast borrowed from modern rock and R&B....

ARTIST: Scott Williams SHOW: Soul Summit at Double Door on Sat 12/19 MORE INFO: scottwilliamsdesign.com

The uneasy ties between black metal and white supremacy are long-standing, tangled, and rarely addressed publicly; even less often are musicians forced to reckon with their own racist histories. But in 2015, rumors of Inquisition’s Nazi affiliations reached such a pitch that front man Dagon had to field questions about them in an interview with Decibel. Dagon said he wasn’t a Nazi, waved away questions about Inquisition’s relationships with infamously racist metal labels such as No Colours, and hedged about his own Hitler-­sampling noise project, 88MM—the name of which is itself an allusion to World War II-era German artillery (and possibly to the neo-Nazi code “88,” another invocation of the leader of the Third Reich)....

Mike Sula Dan bing, Aodake Asian Bistro One more bing and it’s a Thing. Last week DNAinfo profiled the couple behind Nali, a vendor at the Friday Nosh market at Riverside Plaza that traffics in jianbing, stuff-stuffed mung bean and millet crepes. They’re often eaten on Chinese streets for hangover prophylaxis, or what doctors refer to as “breakfast.” Meanwhile in Uptown, all day long at Aodake Asian Bistro they’re serving dan bing, a Tawainese wheat flour version, streaked with double-barrel squirts of sweet sauce....

O lder adults in their 70s and 80s gather in the lobby of New Pisgah Haven Homes every Thursday morning. The low-income senior building in Auburn Gresham provides a necessary service, run by residents for residents: a communal trip to the grocery store. For many older adults who live alone on the south side, being part of a community, remaining active, and having people to rely on are not just important—they’re necessary to their everyday needs and their overall health and well-being....

Jaimie Branch may have moved away from Chicago in 2012, but she’s never severed her roots here. They go so deep on the trumpeter’s first album, Fly or Die, that they could wrap a few times around the Deep Tunnel: not only is it being released by local imprint International Anthem, but everyone who plays on the record is a present or former Chicagoan. The music has a narrative flow that encompasses a series of ongoing exchanges....

When N.W.A dropped their incendiary debut album, Straight Outta Compton, in 1988, the FBI fueled its notoriety with a letter condemning songs such as “Fuck tha Police” for inciting violence. The album, with lyrics reflecting the brutal conditions facing black Americans under the boot of Ronald Reagan’s war on drugs, eventually sold more than two million copies. N.W.A found their message of protest lost on most white listeners, and today the relationship between hip-hop, corporate record labels, and white America continues to obscure the music’s subversive function....

I have a question. I don’t know the answer and I’m not sure anyone does. But certainly this post will be read by some people with a lot more knowledge of the subject than I have. (Some of them, incidentally, had also a personal interest in not angering Mussolini, lest Italian newspapers be induced to spread information about the pederasty that was rife among senior figures of the Vatican, which Kertzer discovered in Italian police files....

Can I interest you in deliciousness?” Kyle Kelly calls to the infrequent passersby on the sidewalk next to his food truck, the Cajun Connoisseur. It’s a cold morning in January, and most people appear uninterested in lingering outside any longer than necessary. Kelly is parked near Polk and Paulina in UIC’s Medical District, in what the city has recently designated one of Chicago’s 37 food truck stands—though it’s not immediately apparent: there are no signs to identify the 40-foot zone, and his is the only truck parked along the stretch....