“It’s a painful reality that so many families are separated in this way,” says Holly Krig, a cofounder of the Chicago Community Bond Fund and Mothers United Against Violence and Incarceration. “When we talk about community safety, harm, and harm reduction, in no way does incarceration, of mothers in particular, in no way does that make anyone safer or improve any lives or make our communities more stable. It profoundly disrupts families and profoundly disrupts communities....

Robbie Fulks has spoiled his Chicago audience. Aside from a handful of weeks each year, he’s in residency at the Hideout every Monday night, trotting out entertaining themed sets that show off his mind-boggling versatility and musical curiosity—he’s explored just about every conceivable strain of Americana, covered great rock songwriters, and even played programs of jazz. As a singer, musician, and songwriter, he’s long been the city’s most potent and erudite triple threat, but his Hideout residency underplays that last talent....

Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington, 800-850-4406 (for appointments), storycorps.org/locations/chicago It looks like we’ll all be immortal for our Facebook friends, but if you’re hankering for an audience that’s a little broader, there’s StoryCorps: all you have to do is lasso a partner and make an appointment for an audio recording session in the booth now permanently parked in the Chicago Cultural Center. Sessions usually take the form of an interview, with one participant drawing an autobiographical tale out of the other....

On Tuesday, Bandcamp founder and CEO Ethan Diamond announced that the service will donate 100 percent of the money it makes from music sales this Friday, February 3, to the American Civil Liberties Union. Diamond wrote on Bandcamp’s blog that he chose to act in response to Trump’s executive order banning people from seven mostly Muslim countries from entering the U.S. for the next 90 days. But even before Diamond made the announcement, Bandcamp was a magnet for musicians hoping to resist Trump’s toxic policies through their work, donating the proceeds from new cassettes, digital-only EPs, and other releases to nonprofits working to help the new administration’s victims (and its likely future targets)....

I feel fortunate to have retained any memory at all of seeing Negative Scanner guitarist and singer Rebecca Valeriano-Flores fronting her first band, Tyler Jon Tyler, at the Empty Bottle ten years ago. I’m foggy on the details—I doubt I could even tell you who else was on the bill that evening—but I absolutely remember coming to the conclusion Valeriano-Flores was a force to be reckoned with. Her bellowing voice wasn’t just a hair-raising surprise coming out of someone so small, it also flat-out commanded your attention....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Monday, March 6, 2017. Even New York Mayor de Blasio is sick of Trump’s obsession with Chicago violence New York mayor Bill de Blasio defended Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel and criticized President Donald Trump during a visit to Chicago Friday. De Blasio told the City Club of Chicago that he’s sick of Trump “denigrating” Chicago on social media and in speeches. “And again, it’s become his surrogate for what he thinks about all cities,” he told the crowd....

January was a month of grim statistics. We finished off the year with 783 homicides, according to the ChicagoTribune‘s most recent count. And last week, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, the Chicago Police Department disclosed that 113 people died in traffic crashes on our city streets last year, including 44 pedestrians and six bicyclists. A preliminary analysis by the Department of Public Health found that residents facing economic hardship suffer crash fatalities at a rate nearly twice as high as those who don’t....

courtesy of the artists Cellular Chaos Rockford native Weasel Walter has always had an uncomfortable relationship with the free jazz that first propelled him onto local stages with the earliest version of his band the Flying Luttenbachers, which included its namesake Hal Russell (ne Hal Luttenbacher) on drums. The multi-instrumentalist’s searing interest in musical extremes of various stripes has always trumped his passion for any single approach, so over the decades in Chicago, Oakland, and New York, his projects have snapped violently between in-your-face takes on free jazz, post-no wave atonal rock, and metal....

David Beltran January is for Jimmy Whispers. When I was younger I’d snap up the day-to-day calendars of Gary Larson’s The Far Side as soon as they went on sale; these days I can never seem remember to buy a calendar at all. But I’m no longer without one for 2014, thanks to David Beltran, who produces under the name Starfoxxx and cofounded the local collective, label, and onetime DIY space FeelTrip—he’s creating a free monthly calendar featuring his favorite local bands, which he’ll be drawing and uploading to Tumblr as the year progresses....

Sicario, which is currently playing in general release, is one of the most formally accomplished things at the multiplexes, a triumph of cinematography, lighting, production, and sound design. Taken together, these qualities establish an unsettling atmosphere that goes a long way in giving the movie its power. Sicario tells the story of a group of federal agents who adopt questionable tactics to bring down a Mexican drug cartel. As director Denis Villeneuve puts it in a recent interview with American Cinematographer, the film is less about cartel violence than how the United States has responded to it, entering a moral gray zone that obscures any good intentions our country may have had in fighting the war on drugs....

Vic Spencer Local MC Vic Spencer, who headlines Reggie’s Rock Club tonight, is usually a hard-edged rapper. He’s got an impressive range and he can smoothly switch up his flow while dropping bars, but his distinctive and pointed growl is a pivotal part of his work. Spencer’s voice and pent-up delivery spikes up through the serene production on July’s Vision Pipes, which was produced entirely by Rocket (who worked on Schoolboy Q’s Oxymoron)....

At this point there are no Chicago screenings scheduled for Okja, the eccentric children’s fantasy from South Korean writer-director Bong Joon-ho (Snowpiercer, The Host)—only a streaming-video release from Netflix, the movie’s producer, beginning June 28. Netflix insists on offering its original content to online subscribers immediately, without giving theater owners a window for exclusive exhibition; normally that isn’t a problem, because few of the company’s original features could survive in a theater anyway, but things are different when you’re distributing something like Okja, the latest vision from a certified auteur in his creative prime....

On Sunday morning I chatted with superb trumpeter Hugh Ragin as we waited for a flight to Chicago from Norway. We’d both been there for the Kongsberg Jazz Festival, where he played in the recently resurrected Art Ensemble of Chicago. Ragin performed in Chicago in early June, and he told me Sunday that during his visit he was able to meet with Kelan Phil Cohran—a cornetist, instrument inventor, composer, educator, and genuine Chicago visionary, who died just weeks later, on June 28, at age 90....

Glitter Guts Thomas Loconti in 2012 Though Thomas Loconti, the street artist known as Plainwhite Tom, danced or mimed or wrote poetry for thousands of Chicagoans, I never saw him perform. We met only over the phone, when I interviewed him in 2012. Because he didn’t own a cell phone for philosophical reasons, he had to borrow a friend’s phone. He was my favorite kind of interviewee—warm, talkative, and insightful, supplying wonderfully specific details without being prompted....

Will Chicagoans all ditch their bikes, cars, and public transportation to zip around everywhere on lime-green electric scooters over the next few years? One of the first decisions I had to make: Where’s the most appropriate place to actually ride the thing? The street felt like a weird place for a compact scooter that resembles an adult version of a child’s toy, but so did the sidewalk, where I could have really annoyed (or even knocked into) pedestrians....

Key to a False Door This year’s Milwaukee Avenue Arts Festival, an open-air art gallery of sorts that takes over the stretch of Milwaukee Avenue from Kedzie to Kimball Avenues, has an awesome live-music lineup, and one of the highlights is Sunday night’s South Stage headliner, the Blind Shake. The Minneapolis-based trio, whose latest LP, Key to a False Door, came out on John Dwyer‘s Castle Face Records at the end of last year, play some of the best “garage rock” I’ve ever heard or seen....

The House Theatre of Chicago’s premiere of The Revel, Damon Kiely’s backwoods Depression-era reworking of Euripides’s classical tragedy The Bacchae, has almost everything going for it. Leslie Buxbaum Danzig directs a nimble, grounded 11-person ensemble who for the most part imbue potentially stereotypical hillbilly hicks with psychological depth. Grant Sabin provides a striking, spartan set design that reinvents the often unwieldy Chopin Theatre and places the audience smack in the heart of the action....

John Kass is so often wrong in my view that I try to maintain a quota system on how often I write to disagree with him. But there’s an idee fixe at the core of Kass’s Tribune columns, and I would not only defend his right to belabor it but think Chicago is better off that he does. When Richard M. Daley’s time came, he was smart enough to realize that a lot of his father’s old critics hadn’t opposed Richard J....

Chicago’s south side isn’t exactly short on breweries, but they’re a lot sparser than they are up north. Just a year ago there wasn’t a single taproom in Pilsen, a problem that Moody Tongue remedied last fall by opening a tasting room. It’s not exactly a casual place to grab a pint, though: the stunning space, with its hand-blown Austrian glassware and limited food menu (oysters and giant slices of chocolate cake), can be a little much for a Monday....

AP Photos If Brazilian soccer star Fred occasionally flops during World Cup action, he’s just following an age-old tradition. Soccer sources who used to keep their mouths shut have finally flipped on the floppers. Fred’s flop put flopping on the table. The debate wasn’t over whether Fred flopped; it was over whether the flop was so egregious that the ref should have let play continue. Instead, he blew his whistle; a penalty kick, a goal, and a 3-1 victory for Brazil over Croatia ensued; and the question was posed in all its amorality: if you don’t flop, can you win at soccer?...