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Courtesy of Kendrick Lamar On Monday afternoon Kendrick Lamar released a new song called “The Blacker the Berry,” and most of the ensuing coverage has referenced Sunday night’s Grammy Awards. The connection makes sense on a basic-news-cycle level considering the Compton MC won two awards for his decent, but not outstanding, 2014 single “i.” The power of Lamar’s new song underlines the insignificance of a perfectly manufactured TV event centered on glamorous people collecting shiny trinkets....

This Oakland-based women’s choir specialize in vocal traditions from eastern Europe, including styles from Russia, the Balkans, Greece, and Turkey. Like their compatriots Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares, Kitka perform both traditional music and original compositions, and have lent their shimmering, otherworldly tones to film soundtracks (in their case, Braveheart, Jacob’s Ladder, and The Queen of the Damned). They’ve created a multidisciplinary work inspired by the Women in Black antiwar movement, released albums focusing on Jewish and Romani music, created an ambitious concept album, The Rusalka Cycle (based on Slavic folklore about vengeful female spirits), and collaborated with avant-garde composer Meredith Monk....

Here are some of our recommended events for the week of 4/2-4/5: Tue 4/3: “No matter where [António] Zambujo finds musical inspiration, the lilt of his phrasing, clarity of his voice, and emotional heft of his measured delivery retain clear connections to fado,” writes the Reader‘s Peter Margasak.

The Earrings of Madame de . . . This weekend, the Music Box wrapped up its series “Weepie Noir: The Dark Side of Women’s Pictures” with a 16-millimeter screening of Letter from an Unknown Woman, the great melodrama by master filmmaker Max Ophuls, whose unfortunately brief career yielded one of cinema’s richest and most resonant filmographies. He is, of course, known for his baroque style and brilliant long takes, but as Francois Truffaut explained in his obituary of the director, “He was not the virtuoso or the aesthete or the decorative filmmaker he has been called....

A lan Epstein had been in Chicago just a year in 2016 when he started What Was Breakfast (@whatwasbreakfast), the Instagram feed dedicated to what its subjects had for breakfast. When he’s not taking photos, Epstein, 37, is a server at the Cherry Circle Room, where he began the project. What Was Breakfast begs comparison to Humans of New York, but Epstein doesn’t ask the same soul-baring-some critics have said saccharine-questions as HONY (“What is your greatest struggle right now?...

Michael Gebert Rene Deleon presses squab for Next: The Hunt in 2013 When we last spoke about the economics of Next, the most interesting and forward-thinking of Chicago restaurants from a business perspective, it had announced its latest season by significantly lowering its entry-level pricing. Last season, one of their premium menus (Trio) had started at $245 per person, making it one of the most expensive restaurants in Chicago (along with Grant Achatz’s other restaurant, Alinea)....

The last time Gil Faizon and George St. Geegland came to Chicago they were selling hot dogs to police at the Democratic National Convention of 1968. They’re a pair of self-proclaimed “racist liberals” who met in Toronto while dodging the draft during the Vietnam war, and they bonded over a shared love of wearing turtlenecks with blazers. That’s the basic story of these two characters, or at least it is according to their creators, comedians Nick Kroll and John Mulaney, the latter a Chicago native....

Chemist and X-ray crystallographer Rosalind Franklin’s crucial contributions to discovering the double helix in DNA were largely uncredited during her too-short life. (She died of ovarian cancer—possibly caused by exposure to radiation in her work—at age 37.) Anna Ziegler’s drama is a sturdy if sometimes overschematic portrait of the professional purdah Franklin endured in and out of the laboratory. (She’s called “Miss” not “Doctor,” and can’t eat lunch with the men because the staff club doesn’t allow women....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Friday, November 18, 2016. With Durbin out, who are the Democrats’ best candidates for governor in 2018? The Democrats are scrambling to find a candidate to run for governor against Bruce Rauner in 2018. Without Senator Dick Durbin in the running, there’s “no anointed insider or consensus candidate,” according to Sun-Times Washington bureau chief Lynn Sweet. U.S. rep Robin Kelly told the newspaper that she’s considering a run, and Sweet mentions a couple of other names: former U....

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. Although they’d been offered sponsorship opportunities, Wells and McDonough turned them down; they didn’t think it was fair for them to accept money if the musicians weren’t being paid. (A few months later, though, they told Miles Raymer that they saw potential for a paying market for podcasts....

Tap dancer Jumaane Taylor, 34, made his professional debut in 2001 with the company M.A.D.D. Rhythms, where he now serves on the board of directors. He teaches at the Sammy Dyer School of the Theatre, the Ruth Page Center for the Arts, and Roosevelt University. He debuted the John Coltrane interpretation Supreme Love in 2015, and as a 2017 Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist he assembled the Jazz Hoofing Quartet. His current work in progress, Ugly Flavors, uses the music of Ornette Coleman and Igor Stravinsky....

Los Angeles and New York might still be the film industry’s biggest hubs, but Kartemquin Films is a reminder that, with support, filmmakers can thrive in Chicago too. “There was a high school I was in on the north side, there were less than five—probably less than three [Black teachers],” she said. “I saw a lot of peer professionals that were Black, security staff, cafeteria food service workers, but not a lot of ‘This is the science teacher in the classroom and she is Black....

Bedouine is the moniker of singer-songwriter Azniv Korkejian, a woman of Armenian descent born in Syria and raised in Saudi Arabia before her family won a green-card lottery and moved to the U.S. The music on the eponymous debut she released last summer feels lighter than air. She’s now based in LA, and the breezy melodies and gentle textures of the record’s songs are reminiscent of the 70s folk rock from the heyday of Laurel Canyon....

The other day I stumbled across my copy of Zaïre-Ghana (RetroAfric), a sparkling 1993 CD collecting tracks that the remarkable Congolese band Zaïko Langa-Langa cut in 1976. I’ve been a fan of Congolese rumba since encountering the work of bandleader Francois Luambo Luanzo Makiadi (aka Franco) about 15 years ago, and as I broadened my awareness of the tradition, Zaïko Langa-Langa hit me with an immediacy that few bands could match....

Howry and Ijichi hooked up with Pak through the collaborative pop-up series Hungry as F*ck, where they originated the dish that would give birth to Mom’s: deep-fried Spam musubi, a Hawaiian snack of sushi rice and Spam wrapped in nori. It’s just one of Howry and Ijichi’s tributes to what they call Japanese comfort food. But in some ways it’s a full-circle embodiment of yoshoku—a branch of Japanese cuisine that adapts Western dishes—which could arguably be traced back to the mid 19th century....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Friday, November 4, 2016. Governor Bruce Rauner has declared today Cubs Day in honor of the Chicago Cubs’ remarkable World Series victory, their first since 1908. Documentary chronicles the stories of two women killed by Chicago police A new 25-minute documentary from Al-Jazeera, The Lives of Women, tells the story of 22-year-old Rekia Boyd, who was fatally shot in 2012 by an off-duty Chicago cop, and 55-year-old Bettie Jones, who was shot and killed by police in 2015 when they responded to a call about one of her neighbors....

After Shawn Carter grew from rapper Jay-Z into all-powerful rap mogul Jay Z, the money he made as one of the most gifted lyricists in music became a key ingredient in his songs—resulting in the sagging nadir that is 2013’s Magna Carta Holy Grail. But a switch flipped with his 13th album, June’s concise 4:44 (Roc Nation/UMG). Call it a response to Beyoncé’s Lemonade (in which she confronts infidelity, a subject her husband addresses here); call it a response to ongoing injustices and the now very public deaths of black citizens at the hands of police officers....

Add the Chicago Human Rhythm Project (CHRP) to the list of noted Chicago performing arts organizations undergoing a major leadership shift during a historic summer marked by upheaval, reflection, and the seismic financial/existential crisis of season cancellations due to the COVID-19 virus. That letter sparked a subsequent onslaught of social media posts stating Alexander made CHRP a place defined by body shaming, sexism, and the cultural erasure of tap’s origins in Black and African cultures....

Q: Is it a superdouchey move to pretend to be a lesbian to avoid unwanted male attention? I’m a straight single woman in my mid-30s and a very plausible lesbian in terms of sartorial stereotypes. Occasionally a guy will hit on me in an awkward or creepy way and I’ll trot out a line about “not being into men.” Most recently I used this pose when a courier broke down in my driveway and I invited him in for a glass of water while he waited for the tow truck....