The best footwork producers show how the fast-and-furious Chicago-born sound can seemingly push an MPC drum machine to the limit as much as it can dancers sweating it out during battles. Footwork’s chest-rattling assault of clustered rhythms is at times hard to fathom—how can two human hands keep a piece of hardware on the brink of bursting into a pile of springs while still making it sing? But Jerrilynn Patton, aka producer Jlin, has advanced the street-dance genre in part by embracing sounds best described as “natural....

In January guitarist Ronnie Baker Brooks released his first album in more than ten years, Times Have Changed (Provogue), and the rumination on progress and decay in its title track might make Brooks sound like an old fogey if it weren’t for the conclusion he reaches (“Nothing remains the same, today it’s a brand-new game”) and the spiky rapping of Memphis MC Al Kapone. “Ain’t nothing wrong with going back to the basics,” Kapone says in the song’s outro, “and some things change for the better too....

Eric Liebowitz John Oliver “Welcome, welcome, welcome to . . . whatever this is,” John Oliver said at the beginning of his new HBO show, Last Week Tonight. At the risk of diminishing the very funny Daily Show correspondent’s solo effort, “it” is, in a lot of ways, a less-frequent version of The Daily Show on which it’s OK to say “fuck.” And that’s great. Oliver proved his anchor chops when he filled in for Jon Stewart last summer, although it’s more fun to imagine he got the job on the merits of his performance as Dick Pants in the canonical Mike Myers smash hit The Love Guru....

Over the course of the next hour and a half, it seemed that little “engagement” was actually happening. A steady stream of aggrieved community members came up to the microphone, sometimes to recount tales of personal experiences with police brutality, sometimes to ask questions far beyond Fairley’s purview, and sometimes, it seemed, just to vent general frustrations. Arewa Karen Winters, the great-aunt of Pierre Loury, a 16-year-old boy shot and killed by CPD officers last April, asked that Fairley release the video of his shooting, as the family has been requesting for months....

Natalie Hoffmann used to play bass with nihilistic Memphis punks Ex-Cult, but in spring 2014 she quit to focus on fronting Nots, her longtime collaboration with drummer Charlotte Watson. After releasing a couple seven-inches, they arrived at their present lineup—with bassist Madison Farmer and synth player Alexandra Eastburn—in time for their debut LP, We Are Nots, which came out last fall. My colleague Luca Cimarusti described it thusly: “Hoffman doesn’t sing so much as holler—she sounds like someone telling you really, really loudly how annoyed she is with you—and the band smashes away relentlessly behind her, brimming with no-frills bad-vibes riffs and paranoia-inducing sci-fi synthesizer....

Iranian-American filmmaker Ramin Bahrani has emerged as our answer to the Dardenne brothers, a proven storyteller with a deep loyalty to the underclass. Man Push Cart (2005) told of a Pakistani rock singer reduced to peddling coffee and bagels on the streets of Manhattan; Chop Shop (2007) focused on two Puerto Rican siblings scavenging metal to supply the scrap yards and auto shops near Shea Stadium; and Goodbye Solo, set in Bahrani’s native Winston-Salem, paired a gentle Senegalese cab driver with a suicidally depressed good old boy....

ANIMATION According to the online bookmakers, the odds-on favorite to win this year’s Oscar for best animated short film is Alan Barillaro’s Piper (6 min.), an adorable frolic in which a baby sandpiper discovers the ocean as a source of food and fun. Created by Pixar, this pixel-perfect short was distributed last summer as an opening attraction for the studio’s monster hit Finding Dory, which grossed more than a billion dollars worldwide; that means Piper was seen by more than four times as many people as have seen La La Land, the top-grossing nominee for best picture....

An amazing thing happened last Wednesday: the mayor’s hand-picked school board momentarily put aside its union-busting agenda to extend an olive branch to Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis. “This is an area where you and I can walk hand in hand to Springfield,” Lewis said at the meeting. “I will sit on that table with you, begging and screaming to get rid of that law. I bet you if we worked on that together, Springfield would respond....

I have a theory. It’s anecdotally based at this point, but I think statistics will bear it out, assuming anybody feels like doing the research. It’s this: that when the world starts looking especially bleak, Chicago’s artistic directors start programming German-language plays. So, when things get bad enough—when we want a vision commensurate with the fucked-uppedness we witness around and inside us—we bring in the experts from Middle Europe. If all of this is hard to watch, it’s not through any fault of Neil Blackadder’s excellent English translation, Bockley’s austere staging, or an ensemble that manages to give us characters who feel true without getting even a little bit sentimental about it....

Like a president named Millard, Grover, or Calvin, the Community Media Workshop came into the world with a name that did it no favors. CMW began 26 years ago as a class—or workshop—taught at Malcolm X College by Hank DeZutter and Thom Clark (each one a former Reader contributor), who wanted community organizations to learn how to approach and connect with downtown media. Today it’s an amalgamation of programs based at Columbia College....

Tift Merritt wrote the songs on her new album, Stitch of the World (Yep Roc), as she attempted to wind down after a divorce, several years of touring both on her own and as a member of Andrew Bird’s band, and the clustered releases of several records, mostly under her name but sometimes with collaborators such as classical pianist Simone Dinnerstein. She retreated to a ranch in Marfa, Texas, and to her own cabin in California to ruminate on a life bereft of certainty, eventually producing a luminescent ten-song collection that embraces the mystery, resilience, and rebirth of life....

Local label Dance Mania never released a massive hit before closing up shop in 2001, but it’s had an immeasurable influence on dance music. In the 80s and 90s the label provided a home for the raw and raunchy subgenre known as ghetto house, and it released some of the earliest forms of juke and footwork. Last year Dance Mania honcho Ray Barney and producer Victor Parris Mitchell (who released several LPs through the label) teamed up to relaunch Dance Mania, and they’ve begun reissuing old material and pressing some new releases....

Jeremy Bessoff’s Zoom In This Saturday at 8:30 PM local animation outfit BAWSY Animation will present the Scored Silent Film Festival at 755 N. Ashland. It’s not really a festival so much as a single event, but it sounds interesting nonetheless. The program consists of new animated shorts—including work by such noted Chicago artists as Anne Beal and Jeremy Bessoff—with live soundtracks performed by local musicians. According to BAWSY’s Facebook page, the event will also feature a marketplace where local visual artists will sell their wares....

I half expected to hear the groans of one of the anguished apparitions rumored to haunt Cave-in-Rock while spelunking the southern-Illinois landmark recently. Strange sounds are said to occasionally reverberate from the 55-foot-wide maw of the cave perched on the banks of the Ohio River. I don’t trust a restaurant that slow on a Saturday evening at 5 PM, so at Yelp’s suggestion journeyed ten miles west to try a catfish joint in a wisp of a place called Elizabethtown (not to be confused with nearby Elizabethtown, Kentucky, which inspired the terrible Cameron Crowe romantic comedy)....

Mamma Roma This week, the Gene Siskel Film Center’s 12-film retrospective of Pier Paolo Pasolini concludes with a screening of his notorious final film, Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom. Similar to David Lynch and Jacques Tati, Pasolini didn’t initially set out to be a director. Before he made his first film in 1961, he was an accomplished journalist, novelist, poet, and political commentator, and he drew heavily from his experiences in these fields when he started working in cinema....

Whether you’re in the mood for an original musical comedy about William Henry Harrison or have an affinity for mariachi music, there are great events to try this weekend: Fri 6/23-Sun 6/25: The annual Logan Square Arts Festival, centered at the Illinois Centennial Monument (2595 N. Milwaukee) features not only arts vendors from across the city, but a robust music line-up. This year catch Air Credits on Friday 6/23, Metz and Joan of Arc on Saturday 6/24, and round out the weekend on Sunday 6/25 with Strand of Oak and Eternal Espiritu Zombi Group....

The mob of horrified faces on the curtain (by set designer Charles Edwards) that rises on Lyric Opera’s production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Il Trovatore sets the mood for the story to come. It’s grim—a tale of such flamboyant vengeance, it became grist for Marx Brothers mayhem in A Night at the Opera. Its most memorable character—and the one it ought to be named for—is Azucena, a conflicted gypsy compelled to avenge her mother’s fiery scapegoat death at the stake....

The Chef: Jeremy Brutzkus (Longman & Eagle)The Challenger:Courtney Joseph (Takashi)The Ingredient: Mastic To incorporate the mastic into the dish, Brutzkus first pulverized it and cooked it into a syrup with sugar and water. “If you heat it, it’ll turn it into almost like a piece of tar. Translucent tar,” Brutzkus said of the mastic. “It won’t dissolve into the syrup; it’ll basically extract some of the flavor out of it, and then you end up with a chunk of mastic that binds up on its own....

Wei Tang stars as legendary Chinese writer Xiao Hong in The Golden Era. If you have time to attend one movie in the next two days, make it Ann Hui’s The Golden Era, which screens again at Showplace Icon tonight and tomorrow. As I’ve noted elsewhere, Hui is one of the most important living Hong Kong filmmakers and a trailblazing female auteur, having worked in nearly every major HK genre since she started directing 35 years ago....

Robert Joffrey’s The Nutcracker seems as essential a part of Chicago’s holiday season as the Daley Plaza tree, Goodman’s A Christmas Carol, pimped-out department store windows along State Street, and those incessant Salvation Army bell ringers. But it is a tradition that almost never was. In March 1988, just three months after his version of the classic Russian ballet made its world premiere in New York, Joffrey died of AIDS-related causes at the age of 57....