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Chicago-via-Michigan rapper Smba plies pop-punk aesthetics to make hip-hop tracks soaked in melancholy. These songs could tentatively be described as Soundcloud rap, since that term (which took hold of hip-hop four years ago) has already been stretched far enough to include any MC with a Fall Out Boy T-shirt, but they have enough dimensions that not even the loosest label can contain them. Smba takes a gentle, inviting approach on their latest EP, Claustrophobic (2DB Company), usually maintaining a level-headed restraint on their half-sung verses even when their syllables cluster in rapid-fire knots—and that sense of self-control and self-awareness lends hopefulness to their most somber lyrics....

If Donald Trump won’t tackle climate change, then Chicago will” was the headline of an August op-ed piece in the Guardian by Mayor Emanuel, who loves to tout Chicago as a green city, all the more so since the Trump administration thumbed its nose at the Paris climate agreement. Earlier this month Chicago played host to a conference (rather grandly titled the North American Climate Summit) that drew 51 mayors who signed on to a charter calling for cities to meet or exceed the targets set by the Paris accord....

A wrongful death lawsuit was filed on Tuesday on behalf of the father of bike courier Blaine Klingenberg, who was fatally struck by a double-decker tour bus at Michigan and Oak during the evening rush on June 15. The suit names bus driver Charla Henry and her employer, Chicago Trolley & Double Decker Company. “Disobeyed a solid red indication on a traffic signal” “Failed to exercise that degree of care and caution that a reasonable person under similar circumstances would have exercised in the operation of the [double-decker] bus”...

Oh, to have been a fly on the wall at the recent closed-door City Hall meeting in which Chicago Public Schools CEO Forrest Claypool pretty much called Tenth Ward alderman Susan Sadlowski Garza a liar. Everyone in the room was shocked to hear a mayoral appointee essentially call an alderman a liar. It violates the general order of things for an alderman to be so blatantly disrespected, even by an aide who’s close to the mayor....

In late 2014, Gossip Wolf was thrilled to hear that Funk Trunk Records had set up shop in Rogers Park—sadly, though, the brick-and-mortar location on 6960 N. Sheridan is no more. Owner Quinn Cunningham broke the news on Facebook last Friday, and he tells Gossip Wolf that the shop officially closed over Independence Day weekend. “I didn’t want to make it into a drawn-out ‘this is the end’ event,” he says....

If you had founded a small professional theater company in Chicago before the mid-70s and wanted to open it in a storefront, you couldn’t have done it without the risk of getting closed down by the city. Before that, you had to call yourself a “club,” as Playwrights Theater Club did in 1953 when they rented a former Chinese restaurant on LaSalle Street. Or you could call yourself a “cabaret,” as Second City did when they rented a former Chinese laundry on Wells in 1959....

Q: I’m a thirtysomething gay man married to a thirtysomething gay man. For almost two years, we’ve been seeing another pair of married gay men around our age. They were our first experience with any sexual or romantic interaction outside of our relationship. The first six months were hot and heavy. We were together constantly and having sex almost every night. After the “honeymoon phase” ended, one member of the other couple (“Roger”) wanted to slow things down....

It was over 30 years ago, but I still remember it well—a gaggle of teenagers had taken to spray-painting graffiti on factories, garages, and houses in my neighborhood. So much for collective action. When it comes to your denials about anti-Semitism in your ranks, you’re starting to sound like Mayor Rahm with the Laquan McDonald video. But, no anti-Semitism on the left? C’mon, lefties—do you live on Mars? Do you not hear and see all the things that you’ve been hearing and seeing your whole life?...

Numerous intersecting lines connect the members of Broken Shadows, a new quartet devoted to the music of three saxophonists who emerged from Fort Worth, Texas: Ornette Coleman, Julius Hemphill, and Dewey Redman (the group also tackles “Song for Ché,” by bassist Charlie Haden, who worked with Coleman and Redman). Front-line saxophonists Tim Berne and Chris Speed worked fruitfully together in the remarkable quartet Bloodcount for much of the 90s; bassist Reid Anderson and drummer Dave King have been playing together for nearly two decades in the Bad Plus; and King also plays in Speed’s fantastic trio....

In the spring of 2015, I walked into the Cook County criminal courthouse at 26th and California. I was there for the resentencing hearing of Adolfo Davis, a 38-year-old man who had been given a life sentence at the age of 14. “That’s Abner Mikva,” she exclaimed. “Ooh,” Morfin replied with a sigh of relief. McKay slipped up more than once, referring to Mikva as “your honor,” or “Judge Mikva....

Last month Philadelphia MC, poet, and sound artist Moor Mother (aka Camae Ayewa) gave a riveting performance at the Hideout, driving her fevered, politically charged oratory with blown-out beats, scuffed-up samples, and in-the-red synths. Few of the spoken-word artists working the post-hip-hop landscape can match her intensity, precision, and metaphoric power; I’ve seen her twice this year, and both times she had total control of the audience by the end of the set....

Underappreciated Chicago metal monarchs the Atlas Moth have been incubating their new album, Coma Noir, for nearly four years, and this week their dormancy comes to a welcome end. The band started out more than a decade ago playing a hybrid of psychedelic stoner rock and sludge metal, but every time they return they have a larger wingspan, dazzling and terrible in a new way. Their latest release is ambitious in scope, and its songs hang loosely on a cinematic framework, inspired by a dark and subversive drama—one that exists as much in the lyricists’ heads as it does in the music itself, and thus hints at more than it reveals....

Last October, as coronavirus cases began to slowly climb throughout Chicago, Kenia Campeano arrived at a brick McDonald’s on the southwest side, where the 31-year-old had worked for nearly two years as a cook. Despite the pandemic, the store did a bustling business, and this particular day felt busier than usual, with customers gathered inside and a line of cars snaking through the drive-thru. As she hustled to assemble orders, the store manager arrived, saw the backup and asked why so few employees had shown up....

What’s in a set? The question’s so blunt that it doesn’t seem worth dwelling on. A theater director might think of a production’s set design, and move on. A mathematician might remember someone’s work in set theory, and move on. But architect and UIC professor Ania Jaworska won’t accept such simple answers. In her solo exhibit at Volume Gallery, “Set,” she implores her audience to pause and ask again: “No, what really is in a set?...

Reeling: The Chicago LGBTQ+ International Film Festival opens tonight at Music Box with a screening of Matt Kugelman’s drag comedy Hurricane Bianca, then moves to Chicago Filmmakers and Landmark’s Century Centre for a week of screenings that concludes with Justin Kelly’s true-crime drama King Cobra. This is the festival’s 34th edition and the third since founder Brenda Webb announced it would go on hiatus in 2013 as the planners rethought their mission and considered such questions as “a change in the time of year that the festival takes place” and “how the festival might expand or evolve to better address the changing needs of LGBT filmmakers....

Richard A. Chapman/Sun-Times Alderman Michele Smith Of all the candidates in this city this election season—both mayoral and aldermanic—you’d be hard-pressed to find a pair who obviously hate each other more than Michele Smith and Caroline Vickrey, who are vying to become alderman of the 43rd Ward. Smith is the incumbent, Vickrey is the challenger, and their enmity has had plenty of time to grow in the past three months because they’ve had to take part in nine separate debates, five in advance of the general election, four more before the runoff....

Ross Compton’s world premiere one-act dramedy ends as a wholly different play than the one it starts as, and that’s for the better. What begins as a perfunctory mash-up of staple theater school writing exercises—The Park Bench Play, The Existential Limbo Play, The Male Playwright’s The Ghosts of Girlfriends Past Personal Spec-Fic—evolves into a pretty sophisticated multisubject character study, even if it doesn’t totally stick the landing. A postgrad (David Hartley) on a mostly empty suburban Metra train runs into a friend—a Mountain Dew Code Red-chugging townie schlub (Ian Gonzalez-Muentener) whose enthusiasm to reconnect gets a cool reception....

The annual Chicago International Movies & Music Festival has moved from April to November for its ninth iteration—though this week’s big event shares a calendar year with an abbreviated April program called “CIMMFest Spring Fling Thing.” CIMMFest proper opens Thursday, November 9, and closes Sunday, November 12, and in those four days will screen almost three dozen feature films (plus a generous selection of music videos and shorts), including a wide-ranging retrospective devoted to director Penelope Spheeris....

Stormy Daniels’s upcoming shows at the Admiral Theatre will feature shout-outs to our very own Mayor Rahm. Trump tried to shut up Stormy—or, at least his lawyer, Michael Cohen, tried to shut her up—by paying her $130,000 to sign a confidentiality agreement. “I expect the line to go around the block,” says Cecola. “That Palin one was huge,” says Cecola. “We had 50, maybe 60, media people, including some from as far away as Paris....

The Old Town School of Folk Music turns 60 years old on December 1. That’s 60 years of music classes and sing-alongs—and most important, thousands and thousands of characters who’ve passed through its various doors, at its original location on North Avenue and its current spaces on Lincoln and on Armitage. The school has also amassed an impressive collection of books and recordings in its basement Resource Center. The podcast launched last week, and new episodes will appear every Thursday on iTunes and Soundcloud....