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As we stood astride bicycles in the shadow of Alison Saar’s Monument to the Great Northern Migration last week, Bronzeville-based transportation advocate Ronnie Matthew Harris, 47, told me that community organizing is in his blood. Go Bronzeville started as an initiative of the Chicago Department of Transportation, along with similar programs in Pilsen, Garfield Park, Albany Park, and Edgewater. The programs educate residents on how sustainable transportation can help them save time and money and improve their health....

A 90-minute braise helped to soften the banana blossom leaves even more; after they came out Giacomino sprinkled the rolls with more fresh herbs, shredded banana blossom petals, and Aleppo pepper. The finished dish turned out to bear little resemblance to grandma’s cabbage rolls, Giacomino said, but it did have an interesting flavor, and he’d try cooking with banana blossoms again. In large saute pan toast the garlic until golden brown, add ground beef, saute until cooked through....

Performance artist and self-described “creative practitioner” Baraka de Soleil addresses the distinct and intersecting legacies of race and disability, often by using dance as a tool to explore the aesthetics of each. Tomorrow (Friday, February 19) at Gallery 400 he will conduct “The ‘Good’ Body (Chicago Edition),” a lecture presented by Bodies of Work, an arts and culture organization within the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Department of Disability and Human Development, as part of its “Exposure” series....

In 2012, a teenage Claire’s employee from Daytona Beach, Florida, going by the X-Men-inspired alias Kitty Pryde released “Okay Cupid,” a dreamy and dreary cloud-rap track that quickly went viral. Just months later Kitty (the Pryde was quickly dropped) started collaborating with fellow Internet hip-hop sensation Riff Raff, and by 2013 she was touring with Danny Brown (at the peak of his XXX-era hype) in support of her excellently quirky and catchy D....

Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place.

A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. Paiste 2000 series I feel like I’ve discovered a little secret here, and I’m nervous to let the world know about it. Paiste made this semi-pro cymbal line for a six-year run in the late 80 and early 90s. They sound great and look super sharp (with brilliant finish options and slick blue labels), and best of all, everybody seems to have forgotten about them—so you can get them used for really cheap....

ARTIST: Bill Connors SHOW: John Maus and Spaces of Disappearance at the Empty Bottle on Thu 7/4 MORE INFO: instagram.com/billconnors

Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago. Kelly McGowan for Mermaid Waves Allen Bourgeois Design by Alexandra Lozano Allen Bourgeois Design by Nora Faye Kiecker

On September 15, 1991, Steven Svymbersky opened the Wicker Park zine and comic-book shop Quimby’s (named after the local-art mag he’d created six years earlier in Boston) on the corner of Damen and Evergreen. Vegetarian haven Earwax Cafe had opened in the neighborhood just a year earlier, indie coffeehouse Urbis Orbis was going strong, and artists were taking over warehouses in the then run-down part of town. According to Svymbersky, in that environment it took just a few weeks for Quimby’s to attract a following....

Pennsylvania singer-producer Adam McIlwee says he doesn’t like emo, but he’s anchored to the genre. For close to a decade, he fronted Tigers Jaw, one of the brightest acts in the fourth-wave emo scene, and his yearning vocals lent the band’s music a hard-to-measure bittersweet allure. McIlwee left the group in 2013, though, and pulled a creative 180 with Wicca Phase Springs Eternal, where he grafts crestfallen ballads onto trap percussion and foggy synths....

About two-thirds of the way into Ash Is Purest White, the latest triumph by Chinese master Jia Zhang-ke, the heroine, Qiao (Zhao Tao, Jia’s regular leading lady), meets a strange man on a train heading north from the central province of Hubei. Qiao was recently released from prison after serving a five-year term; after tracking down her boyfriend, who didn’t bother to meet her upon her release, she discovered that he had taken up with another woman while Qiao was in jail....

A new database of Chicago eviction records published by the Lawyers’ Committee for Better Housing shows that between 2010 and 2017, on average, 79.8 percent of landlords in eviction court had a lawyer, while only 11.2 percent of tenants did. (This confirms the Reader‘s prior independent reporting on landlord and tenant representation.) Access Living Focus on tenants with disabilities Center for Conflict Resolution Free mediation services for tenants and landlords

All the World’s a Stage Andrew Park’s original musical for Quest Theatre Ensemble takes inspiration from Shakespeare’s soliloquy breaking down the seven stages of life, and borrows from its cast’s real-life stories as examples. Scott Lamps’s music is too schlocky to resonate beyond pleasantness; I still left a blubbering mess—earnestly relayed life experiences about addiction, marriage, and loss cut through any of the softness. There’s a genuine feeling of compassion throughout, and any of these monologues would hold up to the best episodes of This American Life....

Since releasing an EP by adventurous Chicago producer Mojek in January, local multimedia and events outlet 119 Productions has been focusing its energies on a forthcoming compilation called Countdown 2 Midnight. The comp’s first single, “Vices” (with drill mastermind King Louie, Save Money rapper Dally Auston, and producer-turned-crooner the Mind), came out in July, and the second arrived on Monday. “Counterfeit” features the dream team of Noname, Saba, and Phoelix—the same young trio that decamped to Los Angeles in June to work on two of the best local hip-hop releases of the year, Noname’s Telefone and Saba’s Bucket List Project....

It’s a strangely beautiful feeling to be marching to an early-voting location through the evening streets of downtown Chicago with Chance the Rapper as grand marshal and thousands of millennials in tow. “Y’all voting on the future right now,” he added. During his set, Chance made sure to remind the crowd that this was a nonpartisan event. He also made sure to acknowledge all the kiddies in attendance. “I know some of y’all niggas are not 18,” he joked—and he asked everyone not old enough to cast a ballot to stay out of the parade, in hopes of keeping the size of the crowd under control....

ARTIST: Dan Grzeca SHOW: Explosions in the Sky at the Empty Bottle on Tue 10/3 MORE INFO: dangrzeca.com

Au Cheval Small Cheval Finalists: The Loyalist, SafeHouse Chicago, Funkenhausen, Davanti Enoteca

Matchess It’s always nice when a solo project comes into its own, and Whitney Johnson, aka Matchess, has taken off into the stratosphere. Better known as the singer and violist of psychedelic Krautrockers Verma, Johnson has been performing as Matchess for years, using prepared tapes, delay-treated vocals, minimal beats, cosmic keys, and viola to pursue her interests in the paranormal and sound art. To make a lazy comparison, she sounds like Nico of Velvet Underground fame lost in the darkest regions of outer space....

Modest Mouse front man Isaac Brock can perform a breezy, carefree song in a way that suggests you should be concerned for his well-being. And his recent public comments haven’t exactly quieted those worries; in interviews for the band’s new seventh album, The Golden Casket (Epic/Sony), Brock has dabbled in worrisome tinfoil-hat theories (he made references to gang stalking, voice-to-skull technology, silent-war conspiracies, and UFOs in his conversation with Uproxx). I don’t want to psychoanalyze Brock based on edited Q&As, though, because it’s a wonder that Modest Mouse’s new music—made during the dreadfulness of the pandemic—sounds more cheerful than their usual strained optimism....

Philadelphia-based shoegaze-revival act Nothing have just announced a release date for their second LP, May’s Tired of Tomorrow (Relapse Records) and along with the news comes the album’s first single. On “Vertigo Flowers,” today’s 12 O’Clock Track, the four-piece push their wall-0f-sound style out of the spacey yearning that dominated their previous record, Guilty of Everything, and into straight-ahead, summery pop. The smooth and sunny tune rides on a warm, upbeat 90s vibe and brims with majestic hooks and melodies....