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It’s that glorious four days of the year when the international art world converges in Chicago for Expo and Chicagoans with exquisite eyeglasses and architectural wardrobes trek out to Navy Pier to join them. They also allow in reporters, which is why I got to go too, although I was clearly marked for consumption by overeager PR reps by my press pass, notebook, and ten-year-old trousers. (I was hoping they were old enough to be considered charmingly vintage, but I don’t think anyone was convinced....

Husband Material Last spring I was obsessing over the “Bite Me” cassingle from Toronto’s Marvelous Mark, the slacker-rock solo project of Mark Fosco, who played in the glammy power-pop band Marvelous Darlings alongside Ben Cook of Fucked Up and Young Guv. A few months ago, Burger Records released Fosco’s follow-up to “Bite Me,” the Husband Material EP, and it’s already one of my most-played releases of the year. It’s a four-song set that takes the poppy, yearning alt-rock of his first tape and amps it up with massive, radio-ready hooks and walls of fuzzy, grungy guitars; with its slamming drums and blown-out amps, it ends up like a poppier-sounding Nirvana....

The Chicago theater community got a pair of year-end jolts with December announcements about the demise of Oracle Productions and the near demise of the Hypocrites. But the two leaders who’d taken the company in this idealistic direction since 2010 were at a turning point. Oracle, with a 2015 operating budget of around $123,000, would be losing the services of executive director Brad Jayhan-Little and executive producer Ben Fuchsen. So their mid-December announcement—that, “due to an unforeseen and dramatic drop in box office sales and fundraising goals,” they would cancel the last two shows of this 20th anniversary season, lay off their six-person staff, and cease producing after a truncated run of Wit (now opening in January and closing February 19), while Graney figures out a new mission and model—was a shocker....

Girlhood, a French drama about poor black teens on the outskirts of Paris, opens with an electrifying sequence set to throbbing dance rock by composer Jean-Baptiste de Laubier. Football players burst onto a gridiron for a night game, their play rendered in slow motion, and in their helmets and shoulder pads they look like pretty tough dudes. A last-minute touchdown prompts wild celebration, but as the players yank off their helmets, the dudes turn out to be women, who separate into their respective teams and file past each other to exchange high fives....

In a Facebook post published Friday evening, Profiles Theatre artistic director Darrell W. Cox dismisses allegations of workplace abuse documented by the Reader during a yearlong investigation of the acclaimed storefront theater. Cox concludes the statement by saying he and Jahraus “welcome a meeting with Lori Myers and Laura Fisher of Not In Our House so we can resolve our perceived differences and work together to fight for this cause.” On June 8, 2016, the Chicago Reader published an article entitled “At Profiles Theatre the drama—and abuse—is real....

“Does journalism have a future?” Jill Lepore asked in the most recent issue of the New Yorker, as prankster turned media innovator Jonah Peretti laid off 15 percent of his workforce at BuzzFeed and then refused to pay most former employees their paid time off. Meanwhile, we’re over here adding pages to our print edition, launching a podcast, and tracking gains in Web traffic month after month (after month). (We also expanded our staff—Davon Clark, welcome to the graphic design team!...

Backstage at the Annoyance Theatre in Lakeview on a recent Saturday evening, a table is arrayed with a ghastly buffet: an assortment of knives, a pair of gardening shears, plastic containers full of fake blood, a decapitated head made of foam, a pumpkin stuffed with pig intestines. Standing beside the eyebrow-raising collection of props, stirring a tub of red liquid with a wooden spoon, is Emily Spindler, the blood master for that night’s entertainment, Splatter Theater....

Chicago rapper Lil Durk dropped his debut mixtape nearly nine years ago, and he’s since matured into one of drill’s most consistent, influential, and successful artists. His four previous major-label full-lengths have all peaked in the top 50 of the Billboard 200, including August’s Love Songs 4 the Streets 2, which debuted at number four. His flair for melody and his no-bullshit hooks have helped give rise to a new wave of drill artists, including everyone’s new favorite Chicago rap sensation, Taurus Bartlett—better known as Polo G....

Lollapalooza will no doubt eat up way more than its share of the music ecosystem’s attention when it kicks off Thursday, but thankfully there’s a lot more going on in town. On Saturday, for example, the Wabash YMCA in Bronzeville hosts the Chicago Poetry Block Party, which not only celebrates poetry but also music and other arts. Rapper and prison abolitionist Ric Wilson is on the bill, and he’s getting ready to drop the follow-up to last year’s The Sun Was Out: an EP called Soul Bounce....

Q: Every day I see ambulances, police cars, and fire trucks hauling ass down the road while masses of (mostly shitty) drivers scramble out of the way. Yet I’ve never seen an emergency vehicle crash or even bump into another vehicle, or a light pole, a parked car, etc. How often does it happen? —Jacquernagy, via the Straight Dope Message Board A: Oh, often enough. In the early 00s, when an uptick in cop-car fatalities lined up with a long-running decline in violent crime, it was looking like vehicle crashes had replaced getting shot as the leading cause of line-of-duty death for U....

See Chicago Dance. The name is direct and specific, and the nonprofit organization formerly known as Audience Architects has wisely adopted it as part of an ongoing rebranding strategy. Audience Architects began in 2006 with a grant from the Chicago Community Trust to figure out ways to increase interest in dance in Chicago. For 13 years SeeChicagoDance.com has provided free promotional services for more than 200 local dance organizations. Unifying the website and the nonprofit under the same name strengthens the brand, and intensifies the drive to build a bigger dance audience....

Late in 2006, a truck driver named Steve Wright was arrested in Ipswich, a river town in Suffolk, England, for the murders of five prostitutes who had offered themselves to men along the town’s London Road, near a newly built sports stadium. The usual media circus ensued, sullying the town’s reputation, before Wright was convicted on all counts in February 2008 and sentenced to life in prison. In the weeks leading up to his trial and afterward, experimental playwright Alecky Blythe interviewed the killer’s immediate neighbors, the reporters covering the case, and even a few sex workers, returning to London with more than 100 hours of recordings....

Chance the Rapper’s third mixtape, Coloring Book, grew into an outsize presence long before the public knew what it was called. In the three years since the Chatham MC dropped Acid Rap, he’s become a special kind of superstar, using his growing fame to benefit his friends and neighbors. He tabled the follow-up to Acid Rap to work on last year’s Surf, an album credited to Donnie Trumpet & the Social Experiment (the latter is the touring band Chance formed in 2013)....

A recent addition to Chicago’s festival calendar, the Doc10 documentary festival debuted in 2016 and moved to the Davis Theater last year with a mix of accessible, cable-ready titles (Obit., Casting JonBenet) and more challenging work from around the world (The Cinema Travelers, Death in the Terminal). That binary strategy continues this year with, on the one hand, portraits of Elvis Presley (The King), Ruth Bader Ginsberg (RBG), and Fred Rogers (Won’t You Be My Neighbor, already sold out) and, on the other, studies of drug cartel violence (Devil’s Freedom) and the breakup of Yugoslavia (The Other Side of Everything)....

Oak Park native Amir ElSaffar has built his career pursuing a rigorous curiosity and commitment to art, and one of his greatest accomplishments is his ravishing hybrid of postbop and traditional Iraqi maqam. His recent Two Rivers project succeeded in part because ElSaffar, an Iraqi-American, is devoted to both disciplines: he studied jazz trumpet in Chicago and maqam—playing santoor and singing—with masters of the austere form in Baghdad. In 2008 he presented the earliest incarnation of what would develop into Rivers of Sound, but it’s only in the last few years that this second project has truly reached fruition....

Otis Rush released some of the most harrowing, emotionally intense blues ever recorded during his late-50s tenure at Chicago’s Cobra label. Though he continued to perform and record, sometimes brilliantly, until his 2004 stroke, those early sides remain the cornerstone of his legacy. Born in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1934, Rush moved to Chicago in 1948. At first, he considered himself primarily a harmonica player, but he honed his guitar chops, incorporating progressive, jazz-influenced ideas he absorbed from the recordings of T-Bone Walker....

The glass on the doors leading to Second City’s Mainstage theater lists the names of cast members from its past revues. The company employees who gathered today outside the Old Town comedy mecca won’t see their names displayed prominently anywhere. They’re ticket takers, servers, bartenders, and they stood in the cold, on the afternoon of the first snowy day of the season, explaining why the union they’ve organized deserves a seat at the bargaining table with the management....

Ten Chicago suburbs and a downstate town are suing a dozen drug companies and a trio of delicensed doctors that the towns say ran an opioid pill mill—causing devastation in their own communities. It continues: “Defendants’ indifference has taken a dramatic toll on Plaintiffs’ communities. Drug abuse, addiction, overdose, and crime caused by Defendant’s illicit activities have imposed, and will continue to impose, tremendous social and economic costs on Plaintiffs....

Tasya Menaker Photography/Courtesy of Smart Bar Joe Shanahan and Frankie Knuckles The late, legendary house DJ and producer Frankie Knuckles had an intimate connection to Smart Bar. He performed numerous times at the subterranean north-side club; of particular note were a standing Thanksgiving Eve gig and a performance in 1982 (when the club was located on the fourth floor of the Metro building) in which hip-hop pioneer Afrika Bambaataa performed downstairs on the main stage....

Q: I have been seeing sex workers for 30 years, and I shudder to think how shitty my life would have been without them. Some have become friends, but I’ve appreciated all of them. Negative stereotypes about guys like me are not fair, but sex work does have its problems. Some clients (including females) are difficult—difficult clients aren’t typically violent; more often they’re inconsiderate and demanding. Clients need to understand that all people have limits and feelings, and money doesn’t change that....