This week’s gig poster was designed by Mobley, a singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist based in Austin, Texas. It advertises his upcoming livestream tour, a series of nine virtual shows to benefit the Dawa Fund. Dawa provides direct financial assistance to people of color experiencing short-term crises—specifically musicians, artists, therapists, teachers, members of the service industry, and social workers. Each show on Mobley’s tour is copresented by a different American music venue; for the Chicago date it’s Subterranean, which will also receive a portion of the evening’s proceeds....

Chicago is kin to the south. No other U.S. city has more ties to the lower half of the country, specifically the Mississippi Delta, aka the Most Southern Place on Earth. All you have to do is spend ten minutes in the presence of Yoland Cannon to understand this. On the 900 block of North Laramie, Cannon is the Tamale Guy. No one talks about Claudio. Most afternoons, weather permitting, he sells Mississippi Delta-style tamales from a yellow cart parked on the sidewalk: ground-beef-stuffed cornmeal magic wrapped in husks and simmered in an oily, peppery brew that delivers the same immediate sensory impact as a shot of whiskey....

When Save Money rapper Towkio got invited to play his first Lollapalooza set this summer, he knew he wanted to make a statement—to show the fans who’d converge on the festival from all over the country what he loves about the city that shaped him. So he reached out to footwork dance crew the Era. Footwork music began evolving in Chicago in the early 90s, drawing on ghetto house and juke but adding complex layers of odd, almost compulsively frenetic rhythms; it grew hand in hand with the athletic, high-octane dance style that shares its name....

As a nonathlete and lifelong Chicago sports fan, I do more than my share of sitting in a chair and grumbling at televisions. Hey, we all have a role to play in the great game of life. There were certainly a lot of non-sport-related reasons to grumble in 2020 but then . . . the freaking Bears. The 2020 Monsters of the Midway came on strong and full of hope and then dissolved into a pile of tears and confusion, like a teenage boy desperate to lose his virginity....

Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter The Hunting Ground continues this week at Landmark’s Century Centre; it’s a compelling new documentary about the threat of sexual assault faced by young women (and some men) at college fraternity houses across the country, directed by Kirby Dick (whose expose of military rape, The Invisible War, was up for an Oscar earlier this year). And Ben Sachs looks at Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter, a movie by brothers Nathan and David Zeller about a Japanese woman who comes to Minnesota looking for the money hidden in Fargo, by brothers Joel and Ethan Coen....

This weekend the Goodman Theatre will present the I Am . . . Fest, three days of events and artistic educational programming, including workshops, film screenings, and play readings, to celebrate women of color. It concludes on Monday evening with the International 10-Minute Play Showcase featuring Chicago playwrights Nambi E. Kelley and Loy Webb and the U.S. premiere of The Interrogation of Sandra Bland by Mojisola Adebayo, in which 100 women of color perform the transcript of Sandra Bland’s arrest....

The goddess of queer punk Vaginal Davis burst onto the Los Angeles performance scene in the late 1970s as the front woman for the art-punk band Afro Sisters, then became an integral influence in drag performance and a matriarch for performance artists. Born intersex during a time when doctors performed medical interventions in order to assign gender, Davis’s mother refused. While her birth certificate stated male, her family used she/her pronouns....

Chocolate-covered foie gras tops the menu at the latest from the Fifty/50 Group, Steadfast, a restaurant with a broad mission that in some ways feels like a peak in the trajectory of this concern, which launched with its namesake Wicker Park bro bar and an obscure regional pizzeria but then branched into classy cocktail bars and downtown hotel partnerships that earned the burgeoning empire high regard. Until now the crown jewel has been Homestead on the Roof, the farm-to-table fine-dining outfit atop the Chicago Avenue doughplex that houses the original Roots Handmade Pizza (there’s a second in Lincoln Square) and West Town Bakery....

In 2016, a video of Ashley “Slim” Stevenson performing a goosebump-inducing cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide” on the Washington Blue Line platform went viral. Since then it’s racked up more than 25 million YouTube views, and until the pandemic stopped her, Stevenson continued to sing and strum her acoustic guitar for appreciative commuters. On April 16, she released a full-length of her own knockout songs, Freedom, recorded with local producer Prov Krivoshey....

U2 kicked off a five-night stint at the United Center last night in support of last year’s Songs of Innocence. You know, the album U2 and Apple decided to gift to everyone who uses iTunes, regardless of whether or not they wanted to hear Bono’s treacly tribute to Joey Ramone? Yes, that album. By many accounts last evening’s “Innocence & Experience Tour” performance was vintage U2—though we couldn’t make it, one of our ace photographers showed up to capture all the action....

ARTIST: Miguel Echemendia SHOW: Paul Oakenfold at Sound-Bar on Sat 3/23 MORE INFO: miguelechemendia.com

This review contains spoilers. Shaft (1971), starring Richard Roundtree and directed by the great photographer and filmmaker Gordon Parks, more or less created the modern African-American screen hero—a man of action, cool, smart, and virile. “We were trying to emulate . . . what white movie stars we admired were doing,” remembered actor Ron O’Neal, who played Priest in Super Fly. “Charles Bronson, Clint Eastwood, Burt Reynolds. . . . We were trying to show a mature, intelligent black man, operating with all the panache and verve of James Bond....

Few forms of music and dance embody raw emotion as exquisitely as flamenco. This formidable and quintessentially Spanish art form fuses elements from Jewish, Arab, and Roma cultures and distills the essence of grief, tragedy, fear, and joy into every note, gesture, and stomp. Hosted principally by the Instituto Cervantes, the first half of the 18th annual Chicago Flamenco Festival (part two is promised this fall) consists of ten performances, an art exhibit, workshops, and a wine tasting over the course of a month....

India’s unregulated, billion-dollar child surrogacy business is booming. The country has some 1,200 assisted reproductive technology clinics, which lure perhaps 100,000 women to rent their wombs to foreigners. As the standard marketing pitch goes, the fees these impoverished women earn can change their lives. But often they’re cheated out of money they’re promised, then denied medical care for postpartum complications. Hoping for a way out of poverty, they often end up more hopelessly mired in it....

I exchanged a few e-mails with soul historian and record collector Bob Abrahamian, but we never met. He committed suicide on June 4, 2014, when depression, anxiety, and insomnia conspired against him and left him unable to fight back. A few days later his friend Jake Austen wrote a touching, revealing remembrance for the Reader, paying special attention to Abrahamian’s genius and generosity. He’d turned himself into the authority on soul records by Chicago vocal groups, and for many years he shared his knowledge and enthusiasm with a weekly radio show called Sitting in the Park....

There are plenty of shows, films, and concerts happening this week. Here’s some of what we recommend: Mon 6/11-Thu 6/14: Paul Schrader’s First Reformed finds pride at the root of despair—”Schrader’s preoccupation here, one he manages to electrify by grounding it in the panic over environmental collapse,” writes the Reader’s J.R. Jones. Directed by Paul Schrader. R, 113 min. Various times, various prices Tue 6/12: A compelling lead performance by Cake-Baly Marcelo, a black economist who in 1976 emigrated to Hungary from war-torn Guinea-Bissau (which as a Portuguese colony was known as the Slave Coast), anchors the Budapest-set drama The Citizen, screening as part of the African Diaspora Film Festival....

The social inequality and stigma afflicting the LGBTQ+ and TGNC (transgender and gender non-conforming) populations in Chicago creates a health-care quandary; they’re more susceptible to issues such as HIV, cancer, and suicide, yet less likely to receive care. The LGBTQ and TGNC population in Chicago is about 146,000 people, according to the Chicago Department of Public Health. Of that population, 80,000 people identify as male, 66,000 identify as female, and 10,000 identify as transgender or gender non-conforming....

ARTIST: Mute Neighbor SHOW: High Command, Den, Rezn, and Rash at ChiTown Futbol on Mon 8/13 MORE INFO: etsy.com/shop/muteneighbor

ARTIST: Jason W. Frederick SHOW: Emmet Otter’s Jug Band Christmas on Sun 12/10 MORE INFO: jwfrederick.com