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Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago. Jeremy W. Floyd: The color scheme approach was presented by the director at an initial design meeting. Geoff wanted to show a shift of the world and the people in it through color: a visual manifestation of the world changing around the Prozorov sisters. The choice of pink/mauve and celadon green colors stemmed from them being complementary colors that proved a distinct difference between the “old” world of the sisters to the “new” world of Natasha....

I wonder if one day we’ll be able to correlate a second surge in Chicago COVID-19 cases to the fact that five months into the pandemic, Lincoln Park got sick of its own cooking. If it turns out June’s reopening of bars and restaurants is even partly to blame for another wave of tragedy, I’m gonna blame the sourdough bros who traded their boules for Corona buckets this summer. This tradition hasn’t died....

British five-piece Paradise Lost had already helped pioneer death-doom by the time they put out their second album, 1991’s Gothic, and laid groundwork for subsequent generations of bands that combined metal’s harshness with dark, romantic textures. They’ve since gone through nearly as many drummers as Spinal Tap, but the rest of the lineup—vocalist Nick Holmes, lead guitarist and keyboardist Gregor Mackintosh, rhythm guitarist Aaron Aedy, and bassist Stephen Edmondson—has remained intact since the band’s founding in 1988....

The New 400 Theater is “the oldest and longest surviving movie theater showing movies in Chicago,” according to Scott Holz, general manager. Opening first in 1908, it was a fixture of the Rogers Park neighborhood with a name that spoke to the optimism of the era. “The New 400 meant what the Fortune 500 means now,” says Holz. “It meant money, it meant the elite.” The theater was shut down for a year due to the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic....

Q: There is a guy at my work who is into puppy play. I know this because I have some friends in the gay puppy community. I don’t give two shits what anyone I work with does to get off. All well and good, except . . . he wants us to call him Spike, his puppy name. Isn’t this a case of him involving everyone at work in his sex life, whether we want to be involved or not?...

Chicano indie-folk band Las Cafeteras formed in 2005, after their members forged friendships while taking classes in traditional music, dance, and art at Los Angeles Mexican American cultural center the Eastside Cafe. The six-piece have built a signature hybrid sound rooted in the Afro-Mexican genre son jarocho, which employs a rich mixture of indigenous themes and melodies, European stringed instruments, and African call-and-response vocals and syncopated rhythms. It took root in U....

This Friday sees the belated Chicago premiere of Abel Ferrara’s Pasolini (2014), a reverential consideration of the Italian poet, novelist, essayist, and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini. Set during the final days of Pasolini’s life in 1975, the movie opens with the artist looking at scenes of what would turn out to be his final film, Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom. (The Gene Siskel Film Center will revive that shocking masterpiece this week to coincide with its run of Pasolini....

Several weeks ago, Donald Trump went on a trip to Paris, saw a big military parade, and rushed back to the White House with big dreams racing through his little brain. In any regards, the president is moving ahead with his parade plans even though . . . And when he returned to Chicago, he could barely contain his excitement, leading to an exchange on the fifth floor of City Hall that probably went something like this....

Caught Christopher Chen’s tantalizing hoax begins with a “preshow” exhibit of works by Chinese dissident artist Lin Bo (Ben Chang). He says a few words about his recent imprisonment, then is suddenly a character in a scene set in the offices of the New Yorker after an American academic has questioned the veracity of an interview he gave the magazine about his imprisonment. When “the play” ends, a real cast member conducts a “talkback” with ersatz playwright Wang Min (Helen Young), who spouts ingenious and impenetrable theories about cultural appropriation....

If you’ve been banging around the Chicago theatrosphere longer than 25 seconds, you know the myth of True West and how Sam Shepard’s bro-ly, brawly mano a mano tale helped the ragtag off-off-Loop Steppenwolf Theatre burst into public consciousness with its 1982 production starring Gary Sinise, John Malkovich, and Francis Guinan. It’s not that True West isn’t without significant problems. Shepard’s one female character behaves in a way so unlikely it feels like she must be overmedicated....

Len Amato spent most of his childhood in Chicago’s West Garfield Park neighborhood. After graduating from Triton College in River Grove and then Columbia College, he knocked around the city working freelance film-production gigs. He never made it as a musician, composer, actor, director, fiction writer, or screenwriter, and he never went to business school. So how did he end up as president of mighty HBO Films, whose roster of socially conscious, award-winning titles includes movies like Game Change (2012) and The Normal Heart (2014) as well as the recent and controversial Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill true-life drama Confirmation?...

He pointed to a sign across the lot warning against unauthorized vehicles; I pointed out that it wasn’t visible in the dark and I was parked in front of a different sign, which said the lot was for Pizza Hut customers only (and, I added, the fast-food joint was gone). We went back and forth for quite a while, until he finally said he’d give me a break and take the boot off my car without charging me....

Chloe Riley One of multiple Rahm Emanuel campaign signs outside Captain’s Hard Time Dining, a south-side soul food restaurant It’s the Friday before election day in Chatham—a south-side neighborhood that draws crowds for the summertime Bud Billiken parade but is plagued by above-average levels of unemployment and crime. Outside the neighborhood’s early-voting polling place, a red union sign reads “Fire Rahm,” a crown perched atop the R in “Rahm.” As early voters file out, several stop to talk about their choice....

With designer Angela McIlvain’s six-foot-long stuffed cow dangling from a meat hook at center stage for almost the duration of the show, how bad could this adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle from Cloudgate Theatre possibly be? Stupefyingly bad, unfortunately, a dumpster fire on stilts. Worst of all, it knows it. Less a play within a play than a failed experiment complete with apology, Kristin Idaszak’s 90-minute offering attempts to combine a dramatic rendition of “tech week” for a new staged version of the novel, the hopeless unraveling of that production as a shocking scene goes off the rails during rehearsal, and the otiose family slide show that the play’s try-hard Writer (Ellenor Riley-Condit) evidently threw together for opening night in lieu of her crapped-out play....

The new Elastic Arts space @elasticarts Last summer the Elastic Arts Foundation suffered many stifling nights thanks to windows that didn’t open and a failed HVAC system that left its space with no air-conditioning. In November the 13-year-old nonprofit pulled the plug on its lease at 2830 N. Milwaukee, its home since 2006, and in March it reopened around the corner at 3429 W. Diversey—with 240 percent more legal audience capacity and almost 70 percent more floor space....

Bob Koester, who died May 12 at age 88, knew what he liked—and what you should like too. For nearly 70 years, he owned Chicago’s Jazz Record Mart (and the Delmark label), and it was completely in character for him to snatch an album from the hands of an earnest young shopper. Koester didn’t care. His approach to retail was idiosyncratic, to say the least—the opposite of Marshall Field’s dictum that the customer is always right....

Ellen Nolan Olivia Chaney In recent years the music of British baroque composer Henry Purcell, who churned out his work during a relatively short period in the late-17th century, has been remade by a handful of savvy modern singers who recognize its importance in the development of British folk music. Back when Purcell was active the lines between high and low culture weren’t so rigid (there was genuine overlap), so it makes sense that artists like Susanna Wallumrød and Tift Merritt, the latter working with the classical pianist Simone Dinnerstein, have delivered richly modern adaptations of some of Purcell’s compositions....

Born in Davao in the Philippines and raised in Des Plaines, Dee Alaba began dancing at the age of four. A graduate of Columbia College, she currently performs with the Seldoms, Loud Bodies, and Erin Kilmurray. She has also appeared in New Dances with Thodos Dance Chicago and DanceWorks Chicago, and with the Cambrians. Here, Alaba reflects on her experiences as a transfemme dancer in Chicago. Before she moved, I was always with her because I was the youngest....

John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2004 play is timely now, in the wake of last month’s long-overdue Vatican summit to address what the current pope called the “scourge of sexual abuse perpetrated by men of the church to the detriment of minors.” Set at a Bronx church school in 1964, the story dramatizes a test of wills between a young priest, Father Flynn, and a starchy older nun, Sister Aloysius, who suspects Flynn of having “interfered with” a 12-year-old male pupil....

In the tradition of heavy-music genre splicers such as Mr. Bungle, Secret Chiefs 3, and Estradasphere, French act Igorrr hybridizes industrial death metal, breakcore, chiptune, and other genres using a dizzying array of seemingly unrelated styles and instruments. Songwriter, DJ, and guitarist Gautier Serre weaves Baroque music, Balkan folk, Eastern motifs, operatic vocals, and death growls into a fabric made from sludgy midtempo riffs, breakneck drum fills, and all manner of digital manipulation....