What would we do without our Irish playwrights? Conor McPherson alone has filled out the season for more than one local theater this year. And the year before that. And probably next year too. You can see his The Night Alive—about which all the critics and my wife are raving—for just a little while longer at Steppenwolf Theatre. AstonRep, meanwhile, has brought back one by Martin McDonagh, who filled the McPherson function with considerably greater nastiness about a decade back....

On Friday, the Chicago Architecture Center will officially open its new home at 111 E. Wacker. You never heard of the Chicago Architecture Center? Not to worry: it’s our good old friend the Chicago Architecture Foundation, formerly housed in the Santa Fe Building at 224 S. Michigan. CAF has given itself a new name to go with the new digs. That would now be the CAC River Cruise—more impressive than ever, given the new crop of towers along the banks of the Chicago River and Mayor Emanuel’s Riverwalk, pretty as a good pedicure, nestled at their feet....

Andrea Bauer Hirsch Metropolitan High School, in Greater Grand Crossing, once had more than 2,000 students. It now has fewer than 300. A mayor who wanted to privatize his school system would realize it couldn’t be done in one swoop. There’d be too much opposition from parents and union teachers. A better plan would be to add charters slowly, and let them nibble off students from the traditional schools. Many of the regular schools would wither away, until closing them seemed only prudent....

Fat Albert (center) stars in Write a Poem, Share Your Feelings ,which kicks off Friday’s program Last week I singled out the outdoor film screenings at Black Cinema House as some of the only events of their kind I’d recommend. If you want to experience one for yourself, the South Shore organization’s first “Movies Under the Stars” program (copresented by the Rebuild Foundation and Chicago Film Archives) takes place this Friday night at 9 PM....

Comedies have never had much of a place in the Romanian new wave. Cristian Mungiu’s celebrated 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007) is about two women trying to obtain an illegal abortion, and his Beyond the Hills (2012) deals with young women who share a history of sexual abuse as orphans. Such acclaimed films as Corneliu Porumboiu’s Police, Adjective (2009), about a young detective who’s put in his place for questioning the country’s harsh drug laws, and Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr....

This year in music isn’t any easier to distill into a list than any other year—which is to say it’s hard to assign a number to Spiderbait, the album that local rock three-piece Vamos released this summer. The band have been kicking around for a few years, releasing a handful of cassettes, opening for the likes of the Meat Puppets, and playing last year’s Riot Fest. Spiderbait was Vamos’s first piece of vinyl, released through Logan Square label Maximum Pelt, which has been on a hot streak this year—its catalog is a veritable tutorial on the finer rock sounds bubbling in the underground....

Total Recall This week’s biggest release is José Padilha’s remake of Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop, a SF classic that’s one of the crown jewels of 80s Hollywood. It’s the second of Verhoeven’s major films to be remade in recent years, following Len Wiseman’s tepid take on Total Recall. I get why major movie studios are keen to remake Verhoeven’s work. They are, after all, consummate Hollywood films, though not for the reasons most people think....

QMy son is 15 going on 16, and he’s been experimenting with masturbation. At the moment, I pretty much just think fine, whatever, he’s a teenager, there’s very little I can do about it. So long as he doesn’t get porn obsessed and start letting his grades slip, it’s fine. The issue is that, a few months ago, his younger sister found one of her tampons in the garbage, and it was covered with poop....

Alison Green Matt Pike of Sleep Last night, San Jose stoner-rock pioneers Sleep played the first of two sold-out shows at Thalia Hall in Pilsen. The massive, tectonic trio have been on the reunion circuit since 2009, hammering out the hypnotic sludge of their 90s heyday. For the past few years, Neurosis drummer Jason Roeder has taken over the drums for the legendary metal band, supplying the oozing stomp that slowly propels them along....

It’s not difficult to imagine the old days of the Chicago Athletic Association, when jowly titans of industry circled each other like rutting pronghorns, slugging whiskey and lobbing medicine balls in their sweat-damp towels. The recent restoration of Henry Ives Cobb’s 122-year-old Venetian Gothic edifice is so remarkable that if you could only shut out the chatter of the new Michigan Avenue hotel’s casually dressed guests you might hear the ghosts of the fusty old patriarchy harrumphing at the sudden presence of the fair sex in their midst....

Michael Gebert Kevin Zraly with a panel of winemakers from Codorniu Raventos Winemakers come to town to put on a show all the time—to talk up their wares and get restaurateurs and wine writers to taste them. They’re always interesting—even if the wine isn’t that interesting, the mere fact that anyone gets to live that life in their family’s 18th-century chateau is enough to get you working on being reincarnated into a winemaking family next time—and they do their best to dance around the ineluctable fact that turning the abstract sensory experience of wine into words never really feels like it works....

Soon after Mayor Rahm announced he wasn’t running for reelection, I got a text from my old friend Ken Davis, host of CAN TV’s Chicago Newsroom, asking how long it would be before I wrote a sentence that began: “Say what you will about Rahm, but . . . ” People who didn’t depend on city services. People whose neighborhoods weren’t boiling over with crime. And the message was that Rahm was the kind of Democratic mayor who was unafraid to inflict damage on the city’s most vulnerable residents—as though that were the true sign of political greatness....

Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago. Isa Giallorenzo: Why did you decide to open LVL3? That night was particularly special for us as we were celebrating our four-year anniversary since starting LVL3. We also just launched a new website, lvl3media.com, and expanded our LVL3 interview series. My outfit that night [was] basically all from asos.com, and Anna’s was a vintage thrift-store find....

English hardcore band Doom came together in 1987 in Birmingham, channeling much of the same grimy, industrial misery as their hometown allies Black Sabbath, Napalm Death, and Godflesh. Spending their initial three-year run pioneering the genre of extreme crust punk, Doom produced an explosive, flawless 1988 debut LP, War Crimes: Inhuman Beings, which set the standard for hardcore, grindcore, crossover thrash, and powerviolence to come. The group first called it a day in 1990, but have reunited and broken up again a handful of times since....

The countdown continues. Read about numbers 40 through 31 here. 27) Necks, Vertigo (Northern Spy) Veteran Australian piano trio the Necks are famous for the way their hypnotic, powerful concerts build slowly from tiny improvised kernels into epic journeys, but they’ve increasingly been exploring and shaping those impulses in the studio as well, rather than simply attempting to capture the feel of their live performances. The single harrowing track on Vertigo uses plenty of electronics and overdubbing, shaping its churning drone with scatterings of fragile melody, thickets of sludgy texture, and ripples of feedback....

According to Pitchfork the website, Pitchfork the music festival‘s lineup is a 7.8 out of 10. The average rating comes from an analysis of Pitchfork’s critical appraisals of albums for each artist on its 2015 festival lineup. (Three of the 46 acts had no album reviews and therefore no numeric Pitchfork ratings: Vic Mensa, Sophie, and A.G. Cook.) Day one headliner Wilco has more Pitchfork reviews (11) than any other 2015 festival act—not including the recently dropped Star Wars, which hasn’t been reviewed....

Since forming 16 years ago, Spires That in the Sunset Rise have been blazing their own trippy path, with the group’s two core members, Kathleen Baird and Taralie Peterson, increasingly embracing a more improvisational ethos while retaining homemade folk roots. That shift has never been more pronounced than in their ongoing collaboration with percussionist Michael Zerang, a partnership that recently dropped its second recording, Illinois Glossolalia (Feeding Tube). Spires began at the far edge of experimental folk music, and while they continue to play an ever-expanding arsenal of instruments associated with folk traditions in the U....

On the fourth floor of the Bridgeport Art Center, a 13,000-square-foot studio is dotted with art in various states of completion. From one workstation to the next, the work ranges wildly in style, medium, and subject matter. One drawing table is surrounded by paintings created by Sereno Wilson, aka Glitterman, who splashes his canvases with glue and sparkles. The adjacent desk is covered in the red and blue paints that Ruby Bradford uses in her offbeat takes on Superman....

1/13–2/25: “History is Boring” at the Mission (1431 W. Chicago) explores how “we document, erase, and subvert our collective interpretation of history.” The exhibit features work by a number of artists, curated by Peter Skvara. Opening reception Fri 1/13, 6-8 PM. Sun 1/15: Poet Clint Smith stops by the Seminary Co-op Bookstore (5751 S. Woodlawn) to read from his debut collection, Counting Descent, an anthology of coming-of-age poems that “seeks to complicate our conception of lineage and tradition....

Sustenance 1/ Local coffee subscription: Back of the Yards, Dark Matter, or Metric Coffee 3/ Mushroom tree ornaments by Facture Goods Pretty amazing pepper from an outfit started by Scott Eirinberg, the entrepreneur who founded, and later sold, The Land of Nod. —Suggested by Kate Schmidt, written by Reader staff Starting at $6.50 at reluctanttrading.com. 3/ Soap Distillery Forget sweaters and scarves, Mochimochi Land gives you the tools to show off your needle skills by knitting something truly unique: cute miniature characters like tiny burgers or tiny walruses or tiny robots and really any other tiny thing you can dream up....