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....

Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago.

Tue 7/4: Navy Pier likely has the best view of the Independence Day fireworks, but check out our guide for plenty of other locations and special events. The Ai Weiwei documentary Never Sorry screens on Thursday 7/6 Thu 7/6: Leave the kids at home and embrace your wild side at Adults Night Out at Lincoln Park Zoo (2001 N. Clark). This after-hours event includes chats about animals, educational entertainment, and multiple cash bars....

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)....

A first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. “So I roll down the window a little bit, and I start apologizing. The gang leader says, ‘Wait a minute. Don’t I know you? Aren’t you Luis?’ I say, ‘Yeah, man! I’m Luis!’ And he goes, ‘I know this guy! He’s cool!’ I open the door to this sea of love. They’re hugging me and giving me high fives....

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....

Tucked Back in an Andersonville alley, Alleycat Comics isn’t the easiest spot to find—but that hasn’t stopped curious passersby from filling the store. “I thought it was such a neat idea that people would have to walk to a secret hidden store, and it seems to keep drawing people,” says co-owner Selene Gill. Have an unusual observation or favorite oddity about a neighborhood? zoomin@chicagoreader.com. 5304 N. Clark 773-907-3404alleycatcomics.com

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....

MERRI L. SUTTON Sonics Looking for something to do today? Agenda‘s got you covered. For more on these events and others, check out the Reader‘s daily Agenda page.

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....

Last July, in the middle of a violent year, Cook County commissioner Richard Boykin gathered Austin residents at the west-side neighborhood’s By the Hand Club for Kids. For three and a half hours, around 100 community members, civic leaders, and elected officials met to discuss what was needed to end the violence in Austin. In 2016, 88 of the city’s 783 shootings, or 11 percent, occurred there. As a result of the summit, a $1 million job training program is now in the works, thanks to money set aside in the 2017 county budget....

The Age of the Earth Starting in two weeks Facets Multimedia will host a weeklong series of films about Brazil’s indigenous population. The lineup contains some impressive-sounding documentaries (including the 1983 short Box of Treasures by local professor and Kartemquin Films board member Judy Hoffman), though if there’s one unmissable film here, it’s the rarely revived The Age of the Earth (1980), which screens Saturday 6/21 at 8:30 PM. Earth is the final work by Glauber Rocha, one of the most important and controversial of all Brazilian filmmakers....

Words and Pictures Critics are calling Cold in July one of the year’s best thrillers—except for our guy, Ben Sachs, who’s calling it a shotgun marriage between the plays of Sam Shepard and the cinema of John Carpenter. Somehow I don’t think that’s going to make it into the movie’s advertising campaign, but I know which review I’m gonna read. Also this week, I wet my pants from the sheer excitement of being in the same room with Tom Cruise, and eventually get around to reviewing his new blockbuster, Edge of Tomorrow....

Tuesday night’s opening reception for “Singing Stones,” the Palais de Tokyo’s exhibit of “emerging” art by French and Chicago-area artists, provided a festive first look at the DuSable Museum’s Roundhouse venue and the work of 13 participating artists. “Singing Stones,” Through 10/29: Tue-Sat 10 AM-5 PM, Sun noon-5 PM, The Roundhouse at DuSable Museum of African American History, 740 E. 56th, 773-947-0600, dusablemuseum.org, free.

Here’s the final installment of the year-end countdown of my favorite albums from 2015. Read about numbers 40 through 31, 30 through 21, and 20 through 11. Josh Berman Trio, A Dance and a Hop (Delmark) Cornetist Josh Berman seems to have found himself leading this deft, agile trio with bassist Jason Roebke and drummer Frank Rosaly. The group’s music balances an investment in sound for its own sake against conversational phrasing and limber, precise rhythms....