Last fall, as part of a dynamic performance by Seval, the Swedish trumpeter Emil Strandberg shared his warm, melodic improvisational style with the audience of last year’s European Jazz Meets Chicago minifest, part of the annual Umbrella Music Festival that takes place at the Chicago Cultural Center. In that group, led by Chicago cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm, musicians create spontaneous arrangements for loose pop-like songs written by the leader. The group demonstrated an incredibly fluid sensibility, reacting adeptly to one another without ever losing a compositional thread....

For its first half, Ulrich Seidl’s documentary In the Basement is a brisk, bracing, and often very funny film about the seeds of fascism in contemporary Austrian society. The people Seidl observes in his short, sketchlike sequences are generally obsessed with order and domination, yet he renders their obsession nonthreatening, if not comically pathetic, by presenting them like characters in a comic strip, centering each of them in symmetrical or near-symmetrical compositions with lots of negative space at the top....

Jackie Coogan and Charlie Chaplin in The Kid At the end of next week the historic Patio Theater will close for an indefinite period, as the owners claim they’re unable to afford repairs to the building’s air-conditioning. (Heather Cherone recently posted a full report on the situation at DNAinfo.) But the Portage Park venue will host two more events before then. Next Wednesday at 7:30 PM, the Northwest Chicago Film Society will present the rarely revived Michael Curtiz crime drama The Strange Love of Molly Louvain (1932)....

ARTIST: Mister Kanos SHOW: The Rewrites and Rai at the Caveyard on Sat 9/26 MORE INFO: misterkanosindustries.tumblr.com

A first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. “One guy had a meat market. The rats were feeding on protein, and they were quite large. The guy sent me down to the basement and said, ‘Watch out for my cat.’ When I came up, I said, ‘Yeah, I found your cat, but I need a shovel. Did you have that cat declawed?’ He said, ‘Yeah.’ That cat didn’t have no way to defend herself, and the rats saw her as another meal....

Q: My husband is nearly 20 years older than me, which was never an issue early in our relationship. However, for approximately the last eight years, we have not been able to have fulfilling sex because my husband can’t keep an erection for more than a few thrusts. I love my husband and I am committed to our family, but I miss full PIV sex. I’m still fairly young and I enjoy sex, but I feel like I am mourning the death of my sex life....

Eduardo Verdugo/AP Some convicted drug dealers doubted that the apprehension of cartel leader Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán was real. Word travels fast in prison. A couple of weekends ago Derek Thomas was watching a basketball game on one of the TVs in a common area inside McDowell Federal Correctional Institution in West Virginia, glad to be out of his cell. Authorities had been putting the prison on lockdown even more often than usual to try to quell conflicts among inmate factions....

Last weekend I stumbled around Manhattan trying to take in the bonanza of the annual Winter Jazzfest. The event has expanded from two days to six, but its heart remains a two-night marathon spanning Friday and Saturday. This year more than 150 first-rate groups performed downtown at more than a dozen venues. Winter Jazzfest takes place during the annual conference of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters, where curators and programmers talk shop and check out artists who want the organization’s members to book or hire them....

Best known for his work with Gillian Welch, David Rawlings seemed intent on using his second album, 2015’s Nashville Obsolete, to differentiate himself from his partner and her sharp updates of American rural traditions. He ended up sounding lost and turbid, extending simple folk-rock themes into endless drones. With his terrific new Poor David’s Almanack (Acony), he’s regained his footing, distinguishing himself by putting his voice front and center. On a loose adaptation of the old folk tune “Cumberland Gap,” Welch’s biting harmonies remind the listener of their bond, and the song’s stripped-down groove and dark melody inject some of the horror of Neil Young’s “Ohio” into Rawlings’s invocation of the gap’s harrowing physical danger....

Steppenwolf Theatre is going back to its own late-night roots for a new series, Late Night at Garage Rep. Following each of Garage Rep’s Thursday-night performances from March 6 to April 17, Late Night will feature performances from up-and-coming Chicago artists. No two weeks will be the same; the lineup promises music, poetry, and some strong words for James Franco. The Gift Theater brings its popular improv group Natural Gas (4/10) to Garage Rep for an entire show based around a single audience suggestion....

I see “Anonymous Women” as an illustration of this anonymity, disguising the identities and quirks of each individual woman for the sake of blending in and maintaining the status quo. Carroll’s own interpretation of her work takes a different approach, examining the “dichotomy of domesticity” that women experience in their own houses. This phrase alludes to the way the home can function as both a relaxing refuge and a restrictive prison for women....

Local pianist and composer Jeff Kowalkowski has consistently demonstrated an easy fluidity between experimental music, contemporary classical, and improvisation, and that mutability might be one of the main reasons he isn’t recognized more widely—people don’t know where to put him or his music. That’s a shame, because he’s one of the most beguiling and interesting performers in Chicago, whether he’s making wonderfully strange sounds with Carrie Biolo in Jack the Dog, playing as sideman in Rob Mazurek’s Electro Acoustic Exploding Star Orchestra, or heading the Chicago Scratch Orchestra, an experimental music ensemble he founded in 2010....

Some journalists don’t have much of anything going for them but grit. But sometimes that grit can be enough. When I looked in on her in 2001, Ruth Ratny, who died in her sleep Tuesday night, was one of those journalists. He roped in a former Screen writer who told me, “I was the last writer left. For all intents and purposes Screen is history. They have no writers,” and launched Chicago Imagining & Sound, Ratny snickered and called it “the clone....

The Adventures of Robin Hood This children’s play, written by Oliver Emanuel, features just two people in its cast—Molly Bunder and Jyreika Guest, who energetically portray the Sheriff of Nottingham and Robin Hood, respectively, as well as a host of supporting characters. Under Omen Sade’s direction, the duo’s accents and well-aimed archery are enhanced by lighting and sound that engages and excites the youngest audience members. During explainer breaks, Bunder and Guest appear as themselves and describe the significance and history of the character of Robin Hood....

Editor’s note: José Ángel’s last name is being withheld to protect him from retribution based on his status as an undocumented immigrant. They likely won’t gain it anytime soon. The Senate’s comprehensive immigration reform bill has stalled in the House, and a path to citizenship—or even legalization—for the 11 million or so undocumented immigrants in the country appears to be off the table for 2014. Republicans want to gain control of the Senate in the midterm elections, and House Speaker John Boehner recently cited a lack of trust in the Obama administration as a stumbling block....

For the past few years the Hyde Park Jazz Festival has featured a sidebar of free film screenings. The tradition continues this Saturday with three half-hour documentaries from the late 1960s by British filmmaker and scholar Dick Fontaine. The films, all of them screening from 16-millimeter, will play at Black Cinema House, which is copresenting the program along with Michael J. Phillips of South Side Projections. Screening at 2 PM is Who’s Crazy?...

A Field in England Starting this Friday Facets Multimedia will host a weeklong run of Nothing Bad Can Happen, an unsettling German docudrama written and directed by Katrin Gebbe. This is Gebbe’s first film, though it feels highly familiar, in part because the novice filmmaker wears her influences (Michael Haneke, Harmony Korine) on her sleeve, and in part because it has much in common with other recent titles released by Drafthouse Films, a young distribution company that aims to “destroy the barriers between grindhouse and art-house....

On November 10, 2016, just two days after the election, local comedy producer Liz Maupin got a call from New York stand-up Jenn Welch. After taking a day to process the reality of a world with president-elect Donald Trump, Welch and fellow New Yorker Emily Winter reached out to connections across the country to see what they as performers could do to combat the incoming administration’s potential threat to human rights....

The Rhinoceros Theater Festival is billed as “Chicago’s longest running fringe festival,” but last year’s edition took a different tack from the 27 before it. Or seemed to, anyway. Where its predecessors appeared to follow the familiar fringe-fest pattern of ignoring patterns, the 2016 fest had a clear curatorial concept: Coartistic directors Beau O’Reilly and Jenny Magnus shaped it around Rhinoceros, the black comedy by Eugene Ionesco that, interestingly enough, didn’t inspire Rhinofest’s name....