Jay Lynch and Skip Williamson, “two seminal figures of the underground comics movement,” as the Sun-Times described them in its obit Monday, died recently, 11 days apart. Each was 72. The late 60s was “quite a vibrant era,” she remembers. “The comix community was tightly knit. There was a real bonhomie kind of feeling, with Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman—they would all crash at our apartment.” “No,” says Wald. “He wasn’t nuts....

“Trump is going to make punk rock great again,” Amanda Palmer declared, speaking at an Australian folk festival last month. The sentiment is callous and somewhat clueless—Beyoncé and Kendrick Lamar and many others were already making excellent political art, and we didn’t need to elect Trump to inspire them. But Palmer is hardly alone in her nostalgia: the present threat of Trump’s fascism has a lot of folks thinking about the antifascist music of the past....

The tango exists in the popular imagination as a sleek, sexy, intimate dance. Hollywood has helped. Films like Easy Virtue, True Lies, and Scent of a Woman all feature spiced-up tango numbers, as of course do episodes of Dancing With the Stars and So You Think You Can Dance. Barack and Michelle Obama went viral after cutting a rug with two tango partners during a 2016 state dinner in Buenos Aires....

Several of the most charismatic and skilled members of the veteran Romani music group Taraf de Haidouks have died since its last studio album from 2007, Maškaradă (Crammed Discs). For many bands the loss of such figures would be irreparable—and to be sure, I’m certain this ebullient combo from the Romanian village of Clejani lacks some of the fiery, magnetic stage presence it possessed when Ion Manole, Nicolae Neacsu, and Ilie Iorga were still alive and kicking....

I always look forward to the Chicago Underground Film Festival, not because the offerings are uniformly great—truth be told, they’re a total crap shoot—but because they’re almost always original. There are no remakes, sequels, or adaptations of best-selling young-adult trilogies; no TV spinoffs or video-game dramatizations or major motion pictures inspired by Funny or Die clips. The people who make these movies labor over them in bedrooms and basements, fretting and fussing over each frame, secure in the knowledge that they can tinker with their masterpiece forever because no one really wants to see it anyway....

Joshua Black Wilkins Justin Townes Earle On his new album Single Mothers (Vagrant), Justin Townes Earle seems to have shed his tendency to move from style to style with each song he’s recorded, settling, more or less, on a study hybrid of 60s soul and country-rock. On his recordings for Bloodshot, I enjoyed the way he moved around the musical map so restlessly because he always sounded like himself, whether trying on honky-tonk, gospel, or rockabilly....

Earlier this month I wrote about the superb toy-piano player Phyllis Chen. A deeply inventive and creative musician, Chen has helped to expand the instrument’s repertoire into something of great breadth and possibility through her efforts as the organizer of the UnCaged Toy Piano Composition Competition and her own imagination as a musician. More recently I’ve been listening to Shadow Piano (Innova), a terrific album of dark, probing music performed by Xenia Pestova, a Russian-born musician now based in Wales, that includes a couple of intense toy-piano works in addition to music written for conventional piano and electronics....

The popular narrative of the historically mild winter of 2016-2017 is that Chicagoans have, if you’ll excuse the expression, dodged a bullet. Zero measurable snowfall in the months of January and February? Unheard of in 146 years of National Weather Service record keeping. Leaving aside all the disturbing climate-change implications, a handful of 60- and 70-degree days in February are phenomena to which we all can surely grow accustomed. And yet ....

Last month state rep Barbara Flynn Currie came to the City Council to let Mayor Rahm Emanuel know what was what with his request for more state aid for his burgeoning teacher pension problems. Well, last week the mayor let Madigan know just what he thought of the message Currie delivered. Emanuel unveiled a plan to extend and expand the Midwest TIF district, which will end up siphoning off tens of millions of property tax dollars, none of it guaranteed to help the schools....

Corner Stores I almost recommended Under the Same Sun—a well-intentioned but inescapably clunky Israeli-Palestian coproduction screening twice next week at the Gene Siskel Film Center—on the basis of the remarkable short film preceding it at both screenings. Running only 25 minutes, Amina Waheed’s Corner Stores manages to say a good deal about inner-city America in general and Englewood in particular, and it delivers a moving character portrait to boot. This documentary centers on Falah Farhoudeh (aka “Abu Muhammad”), a Middle Eastern emigre in his late 60s who’s operated a convenience store in Englewood for about a decade....

If you’re looking for a musical figure to represent the vast and boundless aesthetics of electronic music, you can’t go wrong with Luke Vibert, a producer who’s released music under more stage names than some midcareer musicians have albums (he’s got ten, including his given name, Wagon Christ, and Plug). A native of Cornwall, UK, Vibert imbibed electronic music, hip-hop, and patches of underground rock and pop music while growing up in the 80s....

Taylor Mauch Do ya think this is sexy? There are two reasons I went to see Rod Stewart at Allstate Arena on Saturday. The first is that between 1967 and 1973 Stewart’s output rivaled any major pop artist of the last 50 years, including: two acid-blues albums with the earliest incarnation of the Jeff Beck Group; four albums with the Faces, the famous, shambling folk-blues-rock band he was in with Ron Wood, Ronnie Lane, Ian McLagan, and Kenney Jones; and four more solo albums that were basically Faces albums released under Stewart’s name—one of those albums, 1971’s Every Picture Tells a Story, is just about perfect....

Remember that notice in the Reader‘s Fall Arts special last week? The one advising you to read every word because there’s going to be a test? No? Well, maybe we forgot to run it. But here’s the first question anyway: Which emerging American playwright has not just one but two shows running right now at important off-Loop venues? Death Tax is set in a health care facility—an ideal locus, when you think about it, for a hard look at fact, fiction, and the fiction of fact....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Tuesday, August 29, 2017. Who’s most likely to run against Rahm Emanuel in 2019 Mayor Rahm Emanuel is likely to run for reelection for a third term in 2019, but “he has not made a final decision on whether his polling numbers have rebounded enough to risk facing an angry electorate openly hostile to incumbents,” according to the Sun-Times. Assuming that Emanuel does run, the newspaper has drawn up a list of his potential challengers, from Cook County commissioner Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, former Chicago Police Department superintendent Garry McCarthy, and Cook County sheriff Tom Dart to city treasurer Kurt Summers, alderman and gubernatorial candidate Ameya Pawar, and Cook County commissioner Bridget Gainer....

Last October, when I interviewed the four members of Chicago guitar-rock band Melkbelly for a feature on their then-upcoming LP Nothing Valley, I asked them about their songwriting methods and processes (because what kind of music journo would I be if I avoided such a mundane line of questioning?). Vocalist-guitarist Miranda Winters explained that several of Melkbelly’s tracks begin with what amounts to a stripped-down, minimal guitar-pop song being shot dead upon arrival, dissected limb by limb, and stitched back together into some sort of mutant freak noise-rock supertrack....

You don’t need me, a newspaper reporter, to tell you that we’re living in strange times. I think we always knew deep down that if the Cubs won the World Series there would be some irreparable shift in the universe, but then we were so caught up in the excitement of flying the W flag and watching baseball in November that it all kind of got away from us. And then less than a week later, Donald Trump was elected president....

Mother Falcon I’ve been looking forward to seeing Omar Souleyman at Millennium Park since the Downtown Sound lineup came out at the end of April. That concert isn’t until Monday, but thankfully there are plenty of other shows to go to in the interim. “A few years ago New Orleans bounce artist Big Freedia began to find an audience far afield from her city’s club scene, and her booming popularity among hipsters raised some eyebrows,” writes Miles Raymer....

Chicago: City to See in ’63 In June I named the auditorium of the Museum of Contemporary Art the best underused screening room in Chicago. It seems I may have to revise that assessment—the museum recently screened a 35-millimeter print of Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy, and it will host three separate film programs in January. On Tuesday at 6 PM, Chicago Film Archives will present a program called City to See, a collection of 16-millimeter documentaries about our lovely metropolis....

Second thoughts on recent banner headlines . . . Not even the north has come to terms with this past. Jim Crow was practiced in the south and tolerated and enabled in the north, in Congress, in pulpits, in academia, in corridors of power everywhere, and in editorial pages that viewed segregation “with concern” while advising its enemies to go slow so as not to vex the segregationists. If southerners marvel at how much the north seems to care about their precious flag now, one reason for that is how little we cared then, when a coffee cup bearing the battle flag and the legend “Forget Hell” was a perfect keepsake to bring back from a family trip through Mississippi....

When it comes to Atlanta hip-hop much of the discussion outside the city, at least of late, swirls around the forces of Young Thug, Future, and Migos. Of course, there are so many more mentions to go around for artists within the city limits, and often more than enough for veteran rappers to still flex some muscle on a national level. Take 36-year-old Young Dro, who headlines the Shrine tonight in support of his third album, Da Reality Show, which powerhouse independent label Entertainment One dropped in September....