During the 1960s, in the midst of the civil rights movement against segregation and discrimination, the teachings of the Nation of Islam extended beyond the fight for equality to include racial self-reliance, discipline, and economic independence. The Nation of Islam was founded in Detroit by W. D. Fard in the early 1930s, and quickly thereafter the Honorable Elijah Muhammad assumed leadership of the Nation after Fard’s abrupt departure. By 1934, Muhammad had relocated to Chicago and soon built Temple No....

Perrotta was working downtown as a receptionist when Occupy Chicago hit the streets. As a Columbia College public relations major, she was part of the promotional push behind a successful campaign to restore financial aid for low-income students. So when a friend told her Occupy needed a publicist, she signed on. “They had some good people who could talk to the camera, but they weren’t issuing press releases, and they didn’t have talking points,” she recalls....

Cabaret Any production of Kander and Ebb’s 1966 Broadway hit would benefit from losing half its score (most of the nonfamous songs stop the action dead while belaboring the obvious), but No Stakes Theater Project’s scrappy staging would do well to ax them all. The collective efforts of director Erin Shea Brady, choreographer Mollyanne Nunn, musical directors Emilie Modaff and Erick Rivera, and a loose four-piece band never successfully put a song across or bring the seedy Kit Kat Klub credibly to the stage....

Closed Sessions honcho Alex Fruchter, aka DJ RTC, is getting married! Those of you who never got a “save the date” card can come to the party at East Room on Thursday, September 3, that the Closed Sessions team is throwing in Fruchter’s honor (if you’re at least 21). The killer lineup of DJs at “RTC’s Last Hurrah” includes Rude One, Manny Muscles, and Closed Sessions producers Odd Couple and Boathouse; Closed Sessions cofounder Michael Kolar will “sing the classics” (whatever that means)....

Q: Fortyish straight white dude here. I have this weird (possibly misogynistic) belief that, when it comes to sex, I can’t win. Actually, I think men in general can’t win. Thoughtful, well-meaning men at least. It comes down to this: During sex, if the man doesn’t come, it’s the man’s fault, because he clearly has problems with his dick and is barely even a man and should be ashamed of himself....

The debut full-length album of exploratory Baltimore duo Wume, 2015’s Maintain (Ehse), only sparingly features lyrics, and live the duo of drummer-vocalist April Camlin and keyboardist Albert Schatz generally lock into writhing Teutonic rhythms as compatible with twitchy electronica as with kosmische. But on their new album, Towards the Shadow (Northern Spy), the group edge toward embracing lyrical finery, making Camlin’s voice the focal point of the compositions. Like the songs on its predecessor, the tunes here ring out and ricochet with percussive persistence, but Camlin seems to grab the mike more frequently, or at least with more command....

Shen Wei Dance Arts September 23-24 The New York-based company makes its Chicago debut with Folding and Rite of Spring, two iconic pieces by choreographer Shen Wei, best known for his contribution to the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics—an exquisite homage to Chinese landscape painting. The two works on the bill date from the early 2000s and emphasize Shen’s commitment to abstraction and spectacle. Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 2 PM, Auditorium Theatre, 50 E....

Chrissy Camba has guts. The former Bar Pastoral chef and Top Cheftestant’s menu at the new Laughing Bird features dishes containing whole chicken livers, strands of slippery beef tendon, pork rinds, kimchi-and-pork paté, and a saucy riff on dinuguan, a thick blood stew filled with pig innards that’s sometimes referred to as “meat chocolate.” Attempts to brighten or contrast deeply funky flavors and challenging textures with delicate spring produce yield similarly unnerving results....

This Saturday, August 15, from 1 to 3 PM, artist and designer Landon Brown and the advocacy organization 96 Acres invite drivers with black, brown, or white automobiles to participate in Park, a large-scale public art project, by parking their cars on South Sacramento, adjacent to Cook County Jail, the largest county jail in the U.S. Ideally, the vehicles will occupy half a mile of public street parking. During these two hours, the drivers will tune their car radios to a Vocalo (90....

Well, this is peculiar. If I remember correctly, Steppenwolf Theatre spent a significant part of last season trying to poke its mostly white, mostly aging, mostly bourgeois audience base in the eye with an array of well-sharpened sticks. Antoinette Nwandu’s Pass Over delivered a blow against a pale-skinned power structure designed to make life nasty, brutish, and short for urban black men. Taylor Mac’s Hir portrayed the boom-generation American male as a beast rendered harmless only as long as he’s kept in a drug-induced stupor....

Like a George Grosz drawing come to life, Tadeusz Różewicz’s 1969 satire about an old woman who wants to repopulate the world with her own progeny vacillates between over-the-top grotesque comedy, absurdism, and pitch-black existential despair. Set in a purgatory-like cafe with plasticked-over windows populated by a cast of ghoulish, beat-up looking characters who seem anchored to this wretched spot for eternity, the narrative—such as it is—centers on the Old Woman (Manuela Rentea, in a fiercely committed performance) and her quest to find a doctor who will allow her to once again give birth....

QDoes a person who acts loving only when high on weed really love you? My live-in boyfriend of three years acts sweet, loving, and caring when he’s high, but when the weed runs out, he’s mean, angry, hurtful, and horrible to be around. I’ve asked him when he’s stoned to still act like a loving person when the weed runs out, but of course that never happens. He just dismisses that he’s mean and hurtful, and he blames me for why he’s angry....

Maurice “Mobetta” Brown’s brass is boundless. The trumpeter blows seamlessly in and out of moods that sample liberally from hip-hop, blues, rock, and contemporary jazz, making him a natural collaborator for lyrical poets such as Prodigy, Jean Grae, and Talib Kweli. Brown, a native of south-­suburban Harvey, was also a founding member of Tedeschi Trucks Band, creating the horn arrangements that helped the group win a 2012 Grammy for Best Blues Album for its debut record, Revelator....

JEFF ELBEL / FOR THE SUN-TIMES Adam Lambert is almost as fabulous as Brian May’s hair. A few years ago, when Queen—which presently consists of guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor—toured with Bad Company lead singer Paul Rodgers, the whole affair felt sort of like a nonevent. I don’t have anything against Paul Rodgers insofar as there’s nothing, like, fundamentally wrong with him, but I heard a rumor that they would occasionally play Bad Company songs on that tour, including but not limited to bluesy biker-bar-jukebox jammer “Can’t Get Enough,” and I’m afraid I don’t have any use for that at all....

Hailing from Ghent, Belgium, Charlotte de Witte began DJing in 2010 under the moniker Raving George—she felt she’d have more of a chance landing gigs using a typically masculine name rather than her own. But as de Witte became a force on the European techno scene, she dropped the pretense. “I didn’t feel the need to hide behind a male alter ego anymore,” she told the online magazine XLR8R in February....

Kirin J Callinan The Chicago International Movies & Music Festival wrapped up last night, and if you didn’t get your fill of live music over the weekend there’s still plenty of shows to see this week. “Guitarist Nels Cline titled the new album by this long-running group Macroscope (Mack Avenue), and more than anything Cline has released in his prolific career, it’s wide-angle music—he operates with the mind-set of a jazz musician while drawing on styles and sounds from all over the map,” writes Peter Margasak....

Nellie “Tiger” Travis is a postmodern blues diva, equal parts sass, class, brazenness, and vulnerability. “Slap Yo’ Weave Off,” from 2008’s I’m a Woman (CDS), is a wickedly satisfying bad-girl throwdown; on the same album, “Don’t Talk to Me” is an anguished breakup song, Travis’s taut vibrato quivering with emotion as she reluctantly kicks her ex to the curb. Her biggest success so far, though, has been last year’s “Mr. Sexy Man”: with a propulsive groove powering an insistent refrain of “What yo’ name is?...

The strength of Chicago’s small but lively stand-up scene is its make-your-own-show mentality. Long overshadowed by a storied improv tradition, local stand-up comics have essentially been forced into adopting a DIY approach to producing and booking shows. This naturally results in some pretty unconventional venues, but the success of something like the Lincoln Lodge—the venerable showcase that spent 13 years in a North Center pancake diner before moving to Subterranean this spring—proves that as long as the comedy is good, the location is irrelevant....

Anna Gunn (left) as Skyler White on Breaking Bad Moviegoing isn’t just an activity, but a state of mind—the desire to be lifted up into the work, regardless of whether one views it as art or entertainment. Yet the forbidding winter we’re currently experiencing in Chicago isn’t really conducive to this mind-set. In a season of chronic snowstorms and below-zero temperatures, the most attractive pleasures are the ones you burrow into, as if preparing to hibernate with them—model-building, complicated recipes (preferably involving heavy, roasted meats and/or gravy), and the long-form narratives found in fat novels and box sets of TV series....

Courtesy of the artist Weekend Nachos Local powerviolence unit Weekend Nachos have officially been at it for a decade, and this weekend they celebrate ten years of brutality with a stacked bill at the Beat Kitchen on Sat 9/6. Over the years, the band have gone from a disjointed, spazzy hardcore outfit playing basements in Dekalb—with a name taken from a friend’s ridiculous AIM screen name—to an enormous, down-tuned monster with records out on Relapse....