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You’re not alone if climate change makes you feel like you’re in a sci-fi dystopia. Chicago public artists Luftwerk, on the other hand, were inspired by a trillion-ton iceberg the size of Maryland that split from Antarctica in 2017, and in response they created the multimedia project Requiem: A White Wanderer. It includes sculptures that resemble shards of ice, as well as a sound installation and a collaborative piece for orchestra and voice, the latter created with composer and former Chicagoan Katherine Young....

Raymond O’Neal doesn’t remember where he was the first time he heard the 1989 Boogie Down Productions single “Why Is That?” But he remembers who played it for him: Michael “Mic” Shane. “If it weren’t for that very moment, I’m pretty sure the trajectory of my life would just be completely different,” says O’Neal. By 1995, O’Neal had become an executive vice president at Vibe magazine publisher Vibe Ventures, a job he owed in part to his collaborations with Shane....

Netflix’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is pure art, just as beautiful as it is heartbreaking. Ma Rainey is also the only play in the series set in Chicago. In 1927, Chicago was just eight years removed from the Chicago race riot of 1919, and the Great Migration of Black people moving to northern cities like Chicago had been happening for about a decade. Although the structures of white supremacy in Chicago looked different from those in the south, they were still very much prevalent, and that tension is what the film’s characters walk into when they arrive in the city for a recording session....

Paloma Rocío Castillo Astorga, better known as Paloma Mami, was only 18 when she released her debut single, 2018’s “Not Steady.” Lugubrious and resoundingly confident, the song made clear she wasn’t callow: “I don’t change for no dick,” she declares over a soft-edged dancehall beat whose nocturnal aura sets the tone for a night spent wisely (yet sadly) alone. The Chilean-American artist was signed by Sony Latin on the strength of that one single, and since then she’s gained worldwide popularity....

The dramatic footage from the Norwegian cruise ship stranded in rough waters this past weekend was cool, but you couldn’t sing along to it. For that, you need to head over to Hell in a Handbag’s remount of this 2002 show, the first in the company’s checkered camp history. Created by Handbag founder David Cerda (with help from Scott Lamberty), this homage/spoof of the 1972 Irwin Allen-produced disaster-at-sea film is still mostly shipshape, thanks to a stellar cast....

In early 1997, when I’d been at the Reader just a few months, I learned about a piece of workplace history already treasured by the other music nerds on staff: that time in ’94 when Steve Albini wrote in to tear Reader music critic Bill Wyman a new orifice because Wyman had dismissed the “rear guard from the underground” as “bullshit” in his year-end column while praising the Smashing Pumpkins, Liz Phair, and Urge Overkill....

For several years Angela Burke, who owns a PR company that specializes in food marketing, had noticed that black people in the food and beverage industry weren’t being represented in media coverage. “I decided to just start telling the stories myself,” she says. She’d followed Alisha Sommer, a freelance writer and photographer, on Instagram and admired her work, so four months ago, she invited the other woman to have coffee and discuss collaborating....

This past December, the Art Institute of Chicago unveiled the largest gift in the museum’s history in a new exhibit titled “The New Contemporary.” What’s being shown is part of the collection of Stefan Edlis and his wife, Gael Neeson, who in April donated 44 postwar artworks valued at around $400 million; the generous gift includes pieces by Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly, and Roy Lichtenstein as well as more recent pieces by Cindy Sherman, Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, and others....

A View From the Bridge premiered in its final, two-act form in 1956, the same year its author, Arthur Miller, refused to name names at a hearing held by the House Un-American Activities Committee—part of HUAC’s long and sordid effort to expose “the communist influence” on show business. The U.S. government had already been harassing Miller for a while by then, having, among other things, denied him a passport for a trip to see a Belgian production of The Crucible....

On April 8, several organizations came together for a “Chicago Performing Arts Virtual Retreat.” Representatives from See Chicago Dance, Chicago Dancemakers Forum, the Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago, Links Hall, High Concept Labs, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Pivot Arts, the Arts and Business Council of Chicago, and the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE) led breakout sessions, conducted physical exercises, and fielded questions from nearly 200 participants over the three-and-a-half hours of the event....

Power Trip have long produced crossover thrash for the tattered, sleeveless Cro-Mags T-shirt wearer in all of us—and with their recent sophomore album, the Dallas dudes prove it. Since its release in February, Nightmare Logic (Southern Lord) has been universally regarded as a triumph of dystopic metal, a record that has brought together all adrenaline junkies who require a little grime and sweat in their riffs. Its core message is that the world is a few nudges away from resembling a scorched and abandoned industrial compound, with track titles like “Executioner’s Tax (Swing of the Axe)” and “Waiting Around to Die” playing into that mantra....

Since last summer, it seems like the universe has been telling me to pay attention to Brittney Carter. I wasn’t familiar with the 27-year-old Chicago rapper at the time—from her first releases in 2016, she’d been simmering mostly out of sight, dropping occasional Soundcloud singles or appearing on other people’s tracks. Only in early 2018 did she start performing regularly at concerts rather than at open mikes. But she’s rapidly become one of Chicago hip-hop’s best-kept secrets, earning the backing of a broad cross section of the local arts scene....

E! Elizabeth Hurley (center) is the queen of being not nice. For longer than any of us would prefer to remember, E! (the network that shouts entertainment at you) has been bringing into our living rooms the “true” stories of real-life “famous” people, some horrible, others tragic (RIP, Anna Nicole), and plenty more of them a little bit of both. How many shows have the Kardashians been given at this point?...

Multi-instrumentalist Yuto Winston Kanii moved to Chicago a couple years ago, and he’s kept busy with his easygoing solo indie-pop project, Damacy. He grew up in the Louisville area, where he began playing in bands in high school, and by his early 20s he’d achieved a smidgen of local popularity as the front man for a good-natured indie-rock band called Ranger; their recordings are endearingly rough around the edges, and they assembled their 2013 debut album, The Bard, out of jam sessions recorded in an abandoned candy factory....

In 2012, Gossip Wolf reported on a 2009 supersession involving Chicago cosmic garage band Disappears (at the time singer-guitarist Brian Case, guitarist Jonathan van Herik, bassist Damon Carruesco, and drummer Graeme Gibson), noisy drone duo White/Light (guitarist Matt Clark and electronicist Jeremy Lemos), and Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley. The resulting recording was tentatively scheduled for release on Shelley’s Vampire Blues label in fall 2012—which turned out to be off by about eight years....

Many of us are already starting to go stir-crazy at home, and social-distancing measures haven’t even been in place for a week. If you can afford to invest in new music, now’s the time. Did you get ticket refunds for the canceled shows you were planning to go see? Or do you just have beer money in your pocket that you suddenly can’t spend? You can use it to support musicians without making the pandemic worse....

Local label the Sirens has long upheld the tradition of Chicago blues piano, and in the past decade or so it’s begun exploring the neglected world of gospel piano as well. This show features three artists in the Sirens stable, two with new releases. Elsa Harris’s I Thank God is a mostly instrumental collection of well-traveled church standards featuring Harris on piano, Richard Gibbs on organ, and Curtis Fondren on drums....

UPDATE Friday, March 13: this event has been canceled. Refunds available at point of purchase. Cabrini was a hot topic when Byrne took office in 1979, but the neighborhood—bounded by North and Clybourn Avenues to the north, Chicago Avenue on the south, Larrabee on the east, and Halsted on the west—had been branded as the worst-of-the-worst in city living for over a century. Brooks watched Byrne’s adventure unfold on television. “I was too young to really understand the politics of it....

Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Penance I was ambivalent about David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows when I wrote about it a month ago, but the more I think about this undeniably well-crafted horror film, the less I like it. To be honest, I probably wouldn’t have given it so much thought if the movie hadn’t become a critical and commercial hit (it’s about to enter its seventh week at the Music Box). With regards to recent low-budget American horror, I’m more interested in the unpretentious, but thematically rich, features being cranked out by Blumhouse Productions (Oculus, The Purge: Anarchy, The Lazarus Effect, Unfriended) than in the wave of arty, but thematically thin, horror movies epitomized by Follows and Blue Ruin....

Jackalope and Raven Theatres are firing up the wayback machine this spring with a pair of shows set in 1992. If you don’t remember the era of cassette mix tapes, grunge, and Rodney King, prepare for a crash course on back-in-the-day. “This is a period piece. Except it’s not,” says Wardell Julius Clark, director of Dutch Masters, a two-person psychological thriller by Greg Keller now playing at Jackalope. The play’s contemporary elements are unmistakable, even when (especially when) the dialogue turns to politics, notably David Dinkins’s election as the first African-American mayor of New York City....