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Back when he was an aspiring actor in the University of California-Irvine’s undergrad theater program, Arnel Sancianco joined some classmates at an In-N-Out Burger. “And one of my friends, jokingly, with all love, was like, ‘It’s gonna be really hard for you, Arnel, because they don’t write roles for Asians.’” For Anna Ziegler’s Photograph 51, he designed bookending spiral staircases that framed the gloomy lab where Rosalind Franklin, who helped discover the double helix structure of human DNA, labored in the shadow of her male colleagues....

In March 2020, playwright Heather Chrisler was holding auditions for the world premiere of her first play: an adaptation of Little Women at First Folio Theatre, where she’s an artistic associate. Actor Heather Chrisler, meanwhile, was in tech for The Last Match at Writers Theatre. In both Oak Brook and Glencoe, she recalls, everyone had a gut sense of what was coming and nobody wanted it to be real. All are a welcome departure from the toxic triumvirate of anger, depression, and guilt that Chrisler speaks of, with the caveat that “My grief wasn’t special....

The 2020 Sundance Film Festival featured quite a few flicks full of thrills and chills, and one in particular showcased Chicago’s very own Chris Redd: the psychological horror-comedy Scare Me, which was acquired by Shudder, the horror streaming service, just ahead of the festival. Although now a nationally known comedic star appearing on Saturday Night Live, Redd was born just a regular kid in St. Louis, Missouri. He moved to Naperville at the age of eight, but because his family was originally from Mississippi, he always felt that he had a southern upbringing....

Sometimes Lea Bertucci treats architecture as an extension of her instruments. For the 2019 album Resonant Field (NNA Tapes), the composer, sound designer, and instrumentalist brought her alto saxophone into the confines of the Marine A Grain Elevator in Silo City, a collection of three such elevators in Buffalo, New York. The structure’s size—it’s 13 feet wide and 90 feet high—resulted in a 12-second natural delay that let Bertucci play with or against her own improvisations....

After enjoying the burst of 50-degree weather this weekend, I decided to pop into Heaven Gallery with a few friends. Heaven, which has served as a vintage shop and DIY gallery in Wicker Park since the late 90s, was exhibiting Gwendolyn Zabicki’s solo exhibition “In a Room with Many Windows,” titled after a poem by Jane Hirshfield. It’s a fitting name for Zabicki, who has worked with themes of mirrors, windows, and passageways in previous paintings and projects....

I’ve spent a lot of Reader ink gushing about Uniform and the previous projects of their members. With the release of their new fourth full-length, Shame, the band’s sonic assault continues—and so does my adoration. Formed in 2014 as a wildly abrasive industrial-noise-rock-drone duo of vocalist Michael Berdan (formerly of unreal noisecore trio Drunkdriver) and guitarist Ben Greenberg (who’s played in Zs and Pygmy Shrews and engineered records by every good band coming out of NYC), Uniform have continually streamlined their sound, toying with Wax Trax!...

Ever since John Cage popularized the idea in the 1950s, musicians have worked to find music in the everyday noises of nature and the human-built world. Many composers have sought to transcribe such sounds, as Olivier Messiaen did with the songs of birds and John Luther Adams has attempted in his evocations of Alaska’s great outdoors. Other artists—among them Chris Watson, Annea Lockwood, and Christina Kubisch—use field recordings to create immersive compositions, sometimes complementing the tapes with musicians on conventional instruments....

On February 12, 2019, Qari Delaney spent a candlelit evening smoking a joint alone in his roommate’s jacuzzi tub with a lavender bath bomb. To further set the mood, the 23-year-old Chicago rapper listened to his own music: Operation Hennessy, his first full-length collaboration with local producer, rapper, and DJ Green Sllime, which would come out the next day. “It was honestly deeply meditative—I felt like I was in the ocean or some shit,” Qari says....

Courtesy the artist Adventures Bay Area shoegaze revivalists Whirr are returning to town tomorrow night, Saturday, April 4, playing an all-ages show at Subterranean. These guys are constantly touring with amazing acts—the first time I saw them, high-volume Philadelphia-based shoegaze band Nothing was opening, then down the road they were out with emotional space-rockers Cloakroom. Opening tomorrow’s show is Pittsburgh’s Adventures, a female-fronted emo band that boasts the Cranberries as a huge influence, and on today’s 12 O’Clock Track, “Heavenly,” it’s easy to see why the 90s Irish alt-rockers are a perfect touchstone....

Mayor Rahm Emanuel is notoriously hard to access for interviews, and notoriously evasive even when he does make himself available. As his next reelection campaign approaches, you’d hardly expect him to lay himself bare in lengthy recorded conversations with citizens. And yet that’s exactly what the mayor has been doing since June on his podcast Chicago Stories. Though it’s been a near-weekly component of the mayor’s public life for months, Emanuel’s podcast—available on SoundCloud and iTunes and accompanied by lengthy promotional stories on Medium—has flown mostly under the radar....

R &B singer-songwriter Kelela Mizanekristos, a D.C.-area native who was raised by Ethiopian parents and performs and records under her first name, makes music that sounds like it could’ve emerged from a dream. On her new debut album, Take Me Apart (Warp), she sings with an hard-to-place otherworldly quality—her vocals are both ethereal and exact; she cuts a striking presence even as it feels as though you could run your fingers through the plume of her layered and overdubbed melodies....

For its second year in Millennium Park, the Chicago Blues Festival has expanded, adding a new stage and extending the hours of an existing one. Whether more quantity translates into more quality, though, remains to be seen. A few of the bookings adopt a refreshingly creative definition of the blues—Vieux Farka Touré brings his Mali-to-Memphis roots-blues fusion to the Crossroads Stage on Saturday, for instance, and the flamboyant and impossible-­to-categorize Fantastic Negrito plays Pritzker Pavilion on Sunday....

Near the beginning of Stephen Sachs‘s Bakersfield Mist, a big-time art expert stands in the trailer home belonging to an out-of-work bartender and breaks the news to her that the painting she bought at a thrift store isn’t the genuine Jackson Pollock she hopes it is. “This is shallow. Empty,” he says of the canvas. “It has no allure.” I’ve seen only the first nine minutes and 22 seconds of the documentary, but that’s enough to confirm that it’s framed as a Teri-versus-the-snoots narrative, the primary snoot being the late Metropolitan Museum of Art director Thomas Hoving, who’s shown discussing his “connoisseurship”—and making lots of geeky moves—on his way to declaring that Horton’s painting is no Pollock....

A cutlass descends and the hand of merchant banker Isaac Randall is severed at the wrist. The pirate captain holds it high, removes the ring, and flips the hand over the rail. As his wife, Betsy, watches helplessly, the prancing pirates lift her three young children—Alice, Mary, and the baby, David—and finally Isaac himself and throw each of them into the sea. Now it was 2003, and the president was sending America back to the gulf to clean up his father’s unfinished business....

By coincidence, two of the more provocative documentaries I’ve seen this year arrive in Chicago on Friday. Pervert Park, screening for one week at Facets Cinematheque, takes viewers inside Florida Justice Transitions, a Saint Petersburg trailer park that provides temporary housing for some 120 registered sex offenders. Tickled, which opens at Music Box, chronicles the efforts of two New Zealand journalists to uncover the truth behind “competitive endurance tickling,” a new sport based in Los Angeles, despite a series of legal threats from the sponsor....

Chicago keyboardist and composer Maxx McGathey loves Halloween. The funk group he’s led since 2011 is called Gramps the Vamp, a name that drummer Stevenson Valentor got from a database of Scooby-Doo villains—it comes from a 1977 episode where the gang investigates a vampire haunting a hotel on Skull Island. The band’s instrumental music is moody, comically brooding, and slightly campy. They call it “doom funk.” “He wants to build a career centered on this holiday,” Valentor says....

When I first walked into Black Planet, a sci-fi-themed erotic adult night club, I stood around for a few minutes. I started to jump and fly a little, but quickly realized this wasn’t proper sex club etiquette—some clubs even ban it. This particular club offers live music every day from 2 PM to 4 PM, and I arrived just in time. Neon phallic shapes lit up the room and a figure with large black wings led the dance floor....

Ezra Furman’s “I’m Coming Clean,” released in early 2019, feels oddly prescient. “The world never goes back to the way that it was / That’s just not something that the world does,” Furman sings, sounding tuneful but resigned. “But I’m holdin’ on when the spin gets strong / I’ve got my knuckles tight and bloodless / I’m holdin’ on.” The final episode of the series so far (season three is currently in production, though an air date has yet to be announced) ends with another soundtrack original, “Care....

Despite what you’ve been reading about the far right’s consternation with Bruce Rauner over his ostensible support for abortion in Illinois, I think it’s been a pretty good month for the governor. And many, including Steve Bannon, are talking about recruiting someone to mount a primary challenge against Rauner. But I think it’s mostly bluster. In fact, I can’t understand why they’re so outraged. They knew what they were getting when they overwhelmingly voted for Rauner back in 2014....

At first glance the Buehler Enabling Garden just looks like another plot in the Chicago Botanic Garden, with brick-paved walkways, hanging planters, and raised beds filled with flowers. A closer look, though, reveals that the paths are flat and wide to accommodate people in wheelchairs, the hanging baskets are on pulleys that allow their heights to be adjusted, and the flowerbeds are at various elevations so that gardeners can work on them from a seated or standing position....