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Actors of Asian descent have long been underrepresented in mainstream American movies, but indies help pick up the slack, as evidenced by the Gene Siskel Film Center’s long-running Asian American Showcase. Opening the festival, the formally ambitious Fish Bones (Fri 4/6, 8 PM) stars model Joony Kim as a lovely but vacant Korean student who tends her family’s New York restaurant when she’s not landing fashion photo shoots and attracts the romantic attentions of a Latina music producer....

Nebraska native Charlie Curtis-Beard attends Columbia College, where he’s built a budding rap career with a couple ambitious, heartfelt albums that are grounded in Chicago themes but exploratory in their musical and lyrical focus. On November’s Existentialism on Lake Shore Drive, Curtis-Beard broadens his amiable soul- and R&B-influenced hip-hop into new styles (quite successfully with electropulse of “Can’t See Clear”) while ruminating on what it means to be a young person of color living in the city at this moment in time (the kind of topic that can sustain late-night conversations in university dorm rooms and elsewhere)....

This morning Chicago art gallery Corbett vs. Dempsey—which also runs a superb record label under the same name, focusing on jazz and improvisation—announced the winners of the first Instant Award in Improvised Music. The honor, which includes an unrestricted prize of $50,000, is the first of its kind celebrating improvised music. Major awards such as the MacArthur Fellowship or the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts have occasionally gone to musicians who work extensively in improvisation, among them Ken Vandermark, Matana Roberts, and Nicole Mitchell, but never has such a lofty prize focused exclusively on the practice....

Seeking: men for intellectual, emotional growth and stimulation Occupation: Reader graphic designer; I make invisible art. What do you do when you’re not working? Her friend says: “Relegating Sue’s beauty to a single quote rivals tweeting a summary of War and Peace.” Cooking, kickboxing, sketching, conversing, and documenting dialogue. Smoker? No. Pets? I live with an anxious puppy called Moo. Dietary restrictions? Dietary restrictions are against my culture. Children?...

Since 2007, New Jersey-born producer Kalayisa Drake, aka Kayy Drizz, has been making Jersey club, an aggressive Garden State cousin of Baltimore club—a raw, fast-paced, jittery dance sound that emerged in the late 80s. And earlier this decade, her spin on Jersey club earned her a place in the scene’s most storied collective, Brick Bandits, formed in 2002. These days Kayy calls Chicago home, but the spirit of Jersey club still pulses in the herky-jerky vocal loops and hard-stomping percussion on her latest release, December’s Precious Gems: Cluster 2....

Clancy Eccles is a sadly overlooked giant of Jamaican music who is often credited with coining the term “reggae,” an adaptation of the Kingston slang for loose woman, “streggae.” Eccles was discovered in a talent contest by the legendary producer Clement “Coxsone” Dodd (in either 1959 or early ’60, according to the former’s recollections in the liner notes of the superb two-CD set Freedom: Anthology 67-73 on Trojan Records), and then became involved in many significant musical developments during the 60s and early 70s....

It’s hard to keep up with the prolificacy of John Dwyer, who devotes most of his creative energy to his long-running and often flawless Oh Sees. While I was in the process of digesting the lacerating riffs and pummeling double-drummer grooves on August’s Orc for a preview of their September Chicago performance, they announced their second album of the year. Released in November, Memory of a Cut Off Head (Castle Face) features Dwyer collaborating with former band member Brigid Dawson (who remained in the Bay Area when he took his act to Los Angeles a few years ago), and is something of an outlier in the band’s voluminous catalog....

Ever since I was a kid spending too much time at the Albany Park Library, I’ve always been a book borrower, not a buyer. There are few pleasures as all-engrossing as that of the public library: the sanctuary hush, the rows of shiny plastic-covered books, the grab-bag surprises on the carrel of recently returned tomes. But when Chicago Public Libraries reopened amidst the pandemic, I found myself worrying. Were the librarians given enough PPE?...

Courtesy of Santah’s Facebook page Santah Santah’s new, currently untitled second LP is now available for preorder, but not in the way you’d expect. You can put down ten bucks toward a digital download if you like, or you can shell out $25 for the vinyl edition. Or you can purchase a slot in a fermentation class taught by Vivian McConnell, who sings and plays guitar in the psych-rock band alongside her brother, Stanton....

When you rank the brazen hypocrisy of Republicans in the age of Governor Rauner and President Trump, you have to put the Ken Dunkin affair near the top of the list. When Dunkin caught heat from Democrats for betraying the party’s base, he tried to play it off like he was the second coming of Malcolm X breaking free from house speaker Michael Madigan’s plantation. Hey, voters—remember this the next time you hear Rauner gassing on and on about Democratic patronage and Chicago machine politics, like he did in a column recently published in the Sun-Times....

This story is part of the Marshall Project’s “We Are Witnesses: Chicago” series. In 15 direct-to-camera testimonies, this collection of videos gives voice to Chicagoans affected by the justice system. Watch the videos at themarshallproject.org/chicago. In 2011, the Cook County Department of Corrections bolstered protections for trans women. Sheriff Tom Dart found there was no uniformity to how trans inmates had previously been detained inside the jail. The county’s jail was one of the earliest in the nation to adopt progressive policies like mandating others use a person’s correct pronouns and providing gender-affirming undergarments....

Artist Brendan Fernandes has been having conversations about ballet and mastery within his work for years. The call and response interaction focuses on the idea that ballet is tied to the process of perfection. It can be difficult for ballet dancers to let go and let loose. It’s endurance, labor, and an intense effort for the body to stretch, hold, and pose. The body is challenged to push through any sort of pain to gain a reward....

One of the most annoying trends in fiction right now is the novel based on the life of a literary figure. What’s the point of trying to fictionalize Virginia Woolf or Zelda Fitzgerald when they’ve already told their own stories in their own distinct voices? In comparison, a lot of 21st-century literary ventriloquism just seems like a pale imitation. At times like these, Mazie can come off as pretentious, or maybe just the creation of a novelist, instead of the street-smart New Yorker she’s purported to be....

The music that Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi wrote during the middle of the 20th century predicted minimalism and spectralism, but its forms and sounds remain distinct from those later developments—and from most other European classical music. Born in 1905, he started composing music in the late 1920s and arrived at his mature style after experiencing a catastrophic emotional breakdown in the Iate 1940s. Unable to benefit from available psychiatric treatment, he recovered following lengthy episodes of playing single notes on the piano, which led him to shed 12-tone composition and other complex forms in order to engage directly with pure sound....

A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. The best Moo & Oink commercial ever I cherish my memories of driving to Moo & Oink with my grandparents to pick up slabs of meat. By the time this TV spot started its seemingly endless local run in the 80s, I was too old to believe that people would be dancing in the aisles and waving for catfish, but a girl can dream....

This morning Lollapalooza organizers announced the lineup for their four-day Chicago festival, headlined by Ariana Grande, Childish Gambino, Twenty One Pilots, and the Strokes. There’s usually an odd act out at the top of the bill, and this time it’s the Strokes, who most recently headlined Lolla in 2010—critics were fond of the 2017 oral history of 2000s New York rock, Meet Me in the Bathroom, but otherwise the Strokes have barely moved the needle in the past nine years....

In 2014 black southern outsider artist Lonnie Holley told the New York Times Magazine, “We can make art where we have to. Dr. King, if you remember, wrote a sermon on a piece of toilet paper.” His one-bedroom Atlanta apartment was stuffed with objects he collected for his art: Times contributor Mark Binelli mentioned “DVD cases, egg cartons, torn bedsheets, yellow police ‘Do Not Cross’ tape.” Holley, now 66, didn’t begin making visual art till he was 29....

In a 2016 column in the British gay magazine Attitude, playwright Patrick Cash confessed to a dick move he committed early on in his dating life, when he was 23 years old. After meeting and hooking up with “one of the nicest people [he’d] ever met,” a 20-year-old man who disclosed his HIV-positive status before initiating consensual and protected sex, Cash gave in to fear and stigma the following morning. “His status was why I didn’t call up the boy again....