One of the more welcome film series in town, Asian Pop-Up Cinema (now in its seventh season) presents recent work from east Asia that might not have reached this city otherwise. Case in point: this Wednesday at the River East 21 at 7 PM, it will present Smaller and Smaller Circles (2017), the latest feature by Filipino director Raya Martin, with the filmmaker scheduled to appear for a postshow discussion. Martin’s work has received much attention over the past 15 years—some of his films have played at Cannes, and he’s been the subject of retrospectives in New York and Paris—but his movies rarely play in Chicago....

According to the podcast and arbiter of celebrity minutiae Who? Weekly, famous people can typically be separated into the “thems” and the “whos”—the omnipresent ones you recognize and the obscure ones you probably don’t. In the current sphere of pop music, singer Dua Lipa undeniably qualifies as a “who.” She’s not ironic enough to ingratiate herself with the indie crowd like Marina & the Diamonds, and she’s not quite direct enough to suck in the soccer moms and dads....

Over the last few years Chicagoan Natalie Chami’s output has been prolific, both as a member of improvisational noise trio Goodwill Smith and as her solo project TALsounds. It was just in October that Hausu Mountain released Lifter + Lighter—the latter’s most focused, cohesive effort to date—but its follow-up, Love Sick (Ba Da Bing Records), is already primed to enter the world as a massive leap forward. Chami takes the synthy bliss-drone of Lifter + Lighter and piles on layers of organs and electronic ambience, building otherworldly and overwhelming cascades of sonic warmth....

Some people test the limits of our ability to think clearly about them. President Trump and his Washington playmates fit the description. But movie stars and the whole Hollywood scene will always be in the mix, and over the past week Hollywood took its turn. But that’s the moment when we see them actually pretending to be someone else. Actors acting no more pretend to be other people than Picasso, painting, pretended to be an old guitarist....

Through February 2016, visitors at the Art Institute of Chicago have an opportunity to take in “Degas: At the Track, On the Stage.” By combining two works on loan with pieces from its permanent collection, AIC, says president and curator Douglas Druick, has created “a focused exhibition exploring how Degas used the popular activities of his day to capture the intricacies of the human figure in motion.” The centerpiece of the exhibit is the 1866 oil painting Scene From the Steeplechase: The Fallen Jockey, on loan from the National Gallery of Art....

Simon and Schuster Reading Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life, William Deresiewicz‘s polemic against Americans’ obsession with getting into and educated by prestigious universities was a disconcerting experience. Deresiewicz is an engaging writer. I enjoyed his previous book, A Jane Austen Education, and I would probably have enjoyed being in his class at Yale, where he taught for a decade (provided I could get in, which I could not, even in the prime of my overachieving youth)....

Everyone has a breaking point, and James Lavelle, the Irish Catholic priest at the center of John Michael McDonagh’s Calvary, reaches his one afternoon as he’s strolling down a secluded path toward the seaside in his little village of Rush, County Sligo. Encountering a young girl on his walk, the warm-hearted priest (Brendan Gleeson) strikes up a conversation with her, and her saucy attitude seems to lighten the heavy emotional burden he’s been carrying for days....

Luca Cimarusti, Reader music listings coordinator Screeching Weasel I’ve spent the past few months working on a Screeching Weasel cover band for Halloween. Being required to learn one or two new Weasel tunes every week means I’m listening to these 90s pop-punk masters more than I have since I was in junior high. Sure, Ben Weasel may be a huge piece of crap, but it’s impossible to deny that the man is a musical genius....

“So often it seems to me that jokes we hear about race are designed to make white people feel better about their own racism, or prove that they aren’t racist to other white people,” says Fred Sasaki, who along with Seth Vanek curated “Racist Jokes 101: #OwnYourWords.” The hybrid stand-up show and free-form conversation—part of the duo’s entertainingly educational Homeroom series (Wu-Tang mythology, anyone?)—comes to the MCA in conjunction with the museum’s Word Weekend (7/26-7/27)....

Wayne Dabney/Wikimedia Commons Valerie June Singer and multi-instrumentalist Valerie June hails from Tennessee and isn’t afraid to sing about it. June’s fourth album, last year’s Pushin’ Against a Stone, is steeped in her Memphis roots, which are intricately woven into her earthy lyrics. This summer my roommate played a few songs off of June’s album while we hung out on our porch on a hazy evening, making for the perfect atmosphere to listen to these tunes....

No one could argue that Car2go CEO Olivier Reppert didn’t have some skin in the game during the Chicago launch of the point-to-point car-sharing service this morning in Pioneer Court. He stood motionless in the downtown plaza in front of one of the company’s pint-size Smart cars while young people from the Jesse White Tumblers gymnastics crew bounced off a trampoline, soared through the air Superman-style, and somersaulted over the vehicle and his head....

Architecture Where does the Chicago Architecture Biennial go next? By Anjulie Rao Visual Art Ten best bets for fall visual arts By Tal Rosenberg Literature Eve Ewing explains it all By Aimee Levitt Ten best bets for fall lit Theater Redmoon’s Frank Maugeri is still going strong By Tony Adler Ten best bets for fall theater Dance Five best bets for fall dance By Irene Hsiao Comedy Kellye Howard regularly kills in Chicago, and this fall she’ll go national...

Year-end superlatives are a bogus endeavor. Unless you’ve seen every last one of the roughly 200-plus productions that graced Chicago stages in 2018, you can’t credibly decree which were the absolute best. And even if you did see every last show, comparing multimillion dollar musicals with cash-strapped off-Loop dramas is a ridiculous exercise in apples and oranges. The Golden Girls: The Lost Episodes, Volume 2, Hell in a Handbag Productions Let it stand as a testament to the kind of year this was, what sort of swill we had to wade through just to get out from under it, what kind of singleness of purpose it took just to let our hair down for one night and have fun even, that the show I recommended most to people in 2018 was a fake episode of The Golden Girls in an attic in Andersonville....

TLC Alan condescends to Kirlyam in the grocery store. Should you ever want to marry someone who’s a citizen of another country—but do it here on American soil where the wedding industrial complex can cater to your every whim—your betrothed will have to be approved for a K-1 visa or “fiance visa.” She then comes to the U.S., you guys tie the knot, she becomes a citizen, and you live happily ever after....

Michael valued his cashiering job at CVS as if he were an investment banker. His dream was to work at the national office, despite my insistence that I would rather be dead than live in Woonsocket-where-the-fuck-is-that, Rhode Island. Every night, he ironed his employee polo, then used my straightening iron around the collar for an added crispness. I sat cross-legged on our bed, watching him spray a fine, even mist of distilled water over the navy cotton, following it with the smooth, sweeping movement of the iron....

About a year ago Brent Cayson got the idea to launch a DJ series focused on emo, and he’s since made the Burlington the home for his (mostly) monthly Emo Night. On Thursday Cayson takes over the Burlington’s back room for a live show—an unofficial pre-Riot Fest party that he’s dubbed “Cool for One Night.” Three local emo bands will play, and first on the bill is a young act called Forfeit....

Michael Gebert Nick Spencer at Spencer’s Jolly Posh Foods “You can tell what popular culture Americans have been exposed to by what foods they ask for in the shop,” says Nick Spencer of Spencer’s Jolly Posh Foods, 3755 N. Southport. “If they’ve seen Wallace and Gromit, they want Wensleydale. If they watch Doctor Who, they ask for Jammie Dodgers.” I’ve just introduced him to another one: my kids play the computer game Minecraft (think Legos on a screen) and watch a series of Minecraft vidcasts from the UK, the commentary on which introduced them to Jaffa Cakes, a brand of thin little sponge cakes smeared with orange jam and covered with chocolate....

Pianist and composer Chris Brown, who spent his high school years living in Hyde Park, possesses one of new music’s most curious, restless minds. He’s an inveterate explorer who veers from the strictures of composed music with a hearty improvised music practice: he’s played live computer music in the network band Hub, studied various world music systems, and worked with interactive setups between computers and live instruments. For his latest Chicago visit he’ll play music from his superb Six Primes (New World), a 2016 album of solo piano pieces written in just intonation—a tuning system in which the intervals in a scale are derived not from a constant frequency multiplier but from varying ratios of whole numbers....

Soul singer Zeshan B was born in Chicago, but from a glance at his bio you might not expect him to have rooted his debut solo album so strongly in black music—he’s the son of Muslim Indian immigrants, and that “B” stands for “Bagewadi.” He studied opera in college—we were in the same program nearly a decade ago—and he’s trained to sing qawwali, an ancient Sufi devotional music, as well as ghazal, a south Asian poetic form that often refracts romantic love through the lens of Islamic mysticism....

Gary Mader, who’s been playing bass in New Orleans sludge-metal institution Eyehategod for the past 12 years, has also been playing guitar in Classhole since 2000, and on Fri 5/24, they’re playing at the Burlington. Sometimes active, sometimes not, Classhole is an old-school hardcore band that plays straight-up, in-your-face punk rock, but still relies on the impossibly heavy guitar tones of Mader’s full-time band. Eyehategod is known for the occasional moment of high-octane fury, but it’s nothing like Classhole, which sounds more like Negative Approach than anything, although its members do channel the incredibly hateful, miserable vibe that most of the NOLA sludge crew is known for....