Chicago Architecture Biennial chicagoarchitecturebiennial.org, @chicagobiennial Who would have the nerve to knock down a unique landmark building over the horrified protests of an international roster of top architects one year, then launch a global architectural forum courting the respect and participation of the same architects the very next year? Why, Chicago would! Ergo, the first-ever Chicago Architecture Biennial, anchored by events at the Chicago Cultural Center and scheduled for a three-month run starting October 3....

Progress is not a straight line . . . I think things are gonna work out.” That’s how Barack Obama reassured Anthony Bourdain over beers and bun cha at a tiny, crowded Hanoi restaurant in the spring of 2016, shortly before everything got fucked. Tina Nguyen is the North Shore’s bun cha ambassador. To be sure, you could already find versions of the dish at, say, Uptown’s Pho 777 (where flyers posted to the mirrored wall advertise “Bun Cha Obama”) or the late Pho Lily, where Nguyen found work after emigrating from Vietnam in 2011....

This past Monday evening, the same day a Google Doodle commemorated what would have been the 131st birthday of Alice Paul—a prominent suffragist who believed public demonstrations were the most effective way to voting rights for women—three members of FURIE (Feminist Uprising to Resist Inequality and Exploitation), a Chicago grassroots feminist organization, sat in a coffee shop in Ukrainian Village discussing their own upcoming public demonstration, a counterprotest against this Sunday’s Illinois March for Life, which they have taken to calling the “March for Lies....

Pop music moves fast: new instructional-dance songs, new Drake songs, and new instructional-dance songs by Drake can bombard the zeitgeist one week and all but evaporate the next. Footwork, the lightning-fast Chicago-born house subgenre, is well suited to capture that frenetic pace. Young footwork master and Teklife member DJ Taye instinctively understands how to combine footwork’s adrenaline rush with the pop’s euphoric glee to build tracks with a distinctive energy. Last month he self-released Pyrot3k, the third entry in the Pyrotek mixtape series he launched in October....

Blake and Wycke Malliway, owners of a witchcraft shop in Rogers Park, refuse to let COVID cancel Halloween. “We’ve had to give up a lot right now because of the pandemic; a lot of people feel powerless. Turning to witchcraft can help them realize some aspect of themselves that they want or that they’re yearning for,” Blake says. Lately, visitors to the Malliway Bros. shop are seeking love, money, protection—and alternatives for celebrating this spooky season safely....

Evan Thomas Weiss of Into It. Over It. is a linchpin of Chicago’s emo scene, though he spends much of his time seemingly anywhere but here, touring with one project or another—last year he was on and off the road with Pet Symmetry. Weiss kicked off 2015 by hunkering down in a Vermont cabin with IIOI full-band drummer Josh Sparks (a founding member of Slow Mass and Recreational Drugs) to write the group’s third proper album, Standards....

The Lazarus Effect A thirtysomething couple, partners in work as well as life, are coming apart. They’ve been engaged for three years, but he keeps putting off the wedding, using their professional commitments as an excuse. She, on the other hand, desires a confirmation of their bond, and she can feel herself turning sour the longer she waits for it. Maybe it’s her Catholic upbringing that makes her feel this way or else some psychological need for certainty—she is a scientist, after all....

Ultimate Purity Sludgey noise-rock locals Rectal Hygienics welcome their brand-new Permanent Records release tomorrow night with two in-town shows, the first of which is an all-ages, free in-store at Permanent. The new record, Ultimate Purity, showcases the band’s twisted, heavy-handed Brainbombs worship, and today’s 12 O’Clock Track is the first public glimpse at the damaged LP, “Grandeur.” Employing the “play one riff over and over until it hurts” formula, the band smashes out the devastating, one-part song, its crushing tones and bad vibes steamrolling everything in its path....

I t’s easy to miss McKinley Park’s newest—and only—neighborhood bar among the billboards and bustling traffic at the intersection of Archer and Ashland. All the better that One City Tap has two sets of doors—one on Ashland, one on Archer—that open up into its surprisingly spacious interior. Double the door, double the likelihood that a passerby will end up sitting at the linoleum-topped bar, sipping on a spicy cucumber margarita. A spokesman for 12th Ward alderman George Cardenas wrote in an e-mail that One City has already become a hub for neighborhood gatherings: “A keen piece of the revitalization of McKinley Park is being built upon communication....

Until this year I’ve missed out on the beguiling folk-pop crafted by This Is the Kit, the moniker of Paris-based Englishwoman Kate Stables and a rotating cast of musicians from the UK, France, and beyond. The group’s fourth and latest album, Moonshine Freeze (Rough Trade), has led me to catch up on their previous recordings, but nothing I’ve heard quite matches its succinct beauty. Stables sings with a measured grace, melding sophisticated pop phrasing with a crystalline tone straight out of classic British folk tradition....

Compton rapper Roddy Ricch dropped his debut mixtape, Feed tha Streets, in November 2017, and he’s since earned a spot in hip-hop’s top tier. In the year leading up to his first full-length album, December’s Please Excuse Me for Being Antisocial (Atlantic), Ricch lent his gritty, soulful vocals to DJ Mustard’s Caribbean-flecked smash “Ballin’” and Nipsey Hussle’s bittersweet, reflective “Racks in the Middle,” which just won a Grammy for Best Rap Performance....

Bassist Darryl Jones has the kind of powerhouse resumé that suggests he wouldn’t need the challenge of standing on a small club stage to play his own songs. Growing up in Chatham, Jones studied music at Chicago Vocational High School, where he learned everything from Rimsky-Korsakov to Michael Jackson. At age 21, he won an audition with Miles Davis and landed a gig touring with the jazz great throughout the mid-1980s....

November 2, 7 PM, the polling place. I am the key judge. (I got the call on Saturday at 5. “I’ve never done this before,” I say. “There’s nothing to it,” says the woman from Board of the Elections. “You just unlock the door.”) I have to go downtown to get the key. They are shocked I have biked the whole way. They tell me checking the supplies cabinet the night before is optional....

Few bands embody the aesthetic of alt-rock as thoroughly as Throwing Muses. Founded in Rhode Island in 1983 by teenage stepsisters Kristin Hersh and Tanya Donelly, the group made moody songs rife with sharp-tongued lyrics, postpunk guitars, and psych-folk vocal harmonies. Guitarists Hersh and Donelly traded lead vocals and shared the songwriting, and after adding bassist Leslie Langston and drummer David Narcizo, the band recorded a demo that eventually landed them a deal with London indie 4AD—the label’s first American signing....

UPDATE Thursday, March 12, 9:45 PM: this event has been canceled. Refunds available at point of purchase. In the Chicago premiere of this Henrik Ibsen adaptation, Raven Theatre and director Lauren Shouse create masterful suspense—something that could be difficult to pull off with a setting of 1870s Norway. The strength of Anne-Charlotte Hanes Harvey’s translation, adapted by herself and Kirsten Brandt, is its use of contemporary language and a tighter, two-act structure to drive this proto-feminist tale of a disintegrating marriage and a young woman discovering herself....

Chicago actor Kareem Bandealy is a busy man, with a bio packed with A-list acting gigs at, among other places, the Goodman, Court Theatre, Writers Theatre, and, of course, Lookingglass, where he’s an ensemble member. Still, somehow, he found time to write a play. And get it produced, at Lookingglass. And now it’s being reviewed, by me. Of course, this has been done before—and better (see Waiting for Godot). Bandealy gives us a lighter version of theater of the absurd: milder, sweeter, and stripped of its anger and conviction and passion....

Michael Gebert Any argument about who’s had the biggest influence on food in Chicago—Achatz or Trotter? Szathmary or Banchet?—can immediately be shut down once someone makes mention of Ray Kroc. The shake-machine salesman built McDonald’s into the epitome of a worldwide fast-food empire. If you think that’s a bad thing, it probably is in some ways. But I was in Budapest a year after Communism fell. There were two McDonald’s there, and they were filled with locals....

Saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock and drummer Tom Rainey have been married to each other since 2010 and playing together since 2007, working as a duo as well as within larger ensembles, where they’ve collaborated with avant-garde jazz musicians such as Tim Berne and Mary Halvorson. Though the duo initially focused on improvisational music, a 2016 tour inspired them to incorporate more composition into their work. This is evident on their third album, 2018’s Utter (Relative Pitch), which is largely improvised but adds three composed pieces: Laubrock wrote “Chant II,” and the two of them collaborated on the opening and closing tracks, “Flutter” and “Shutter....

When drill erupted out of Chicago three years ago behind the rise of Chief Keef, the infamous MC brought his close circle of friends with him into the limelight. Many inked deals with major labels, though Sadiki Thirston, aka SD, went indie—he’s released a string of Life of a Savage mixtapes and a studio album, November’s Truly Blessed, which he put out through LA’s IHipHop Distribution. SD’s name is less recognizable than, say, fellow drill rappers Lil Durk or Lil Reese, but SD is exalted among hip-hop heads who follow this scene closely....

And now for a statement I never thought that I, a grown adult man, would ever put on the record: John Mayer rips. I know, I know, but bear with me here. For the past four years, three of the four surviving founding members of the Grateful Dead—drummer Bill Kreutzmann, drummer and percussionist Mickey Hart, and rhythm guitarist and singer Bob Weir—have been touring the world as Dead & Company and playing from the greatest songbook in American history....