After this past election, activist Anne Haag was mad and didn’t care who knew it. “I’m angry that there are people who think that banning Muslims and banning refugees is going to solve anything and not just make it worse, and angry that one in six women is going to be sexually assaulted in her lifetime [according to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network] and angry that we still have to explain why ‘all lives matter’ is a problematic thing to say,” Haag says....

Chicago is practically a museum of Stanley Tigerman’s architectural endeavors. The 83-year-old worked with modernist greats at Keck & Keck and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in the 1940s and 50s, spearheaded the Chicago Seven group of postmodern architects in the 70s, and founded Archeworks, the socially conscious River North design school, in the mid-90s. The Art Institute’s “Architecture to Scale” showcases the contributions of the bad-boy architect, whose designs include everything from the Illinois Holocaust Museum in Skokie to an Indiana vacation home that looks like a penis and testicles....

Tandem Productions GmbH & Film Afrika Worldwide Vanessa Kirby as Alice Tanner Did you read that the CW was airing a Labyrinth miniseries, and then assume that it was a TV adaptation of the 1986 Jim Henson film of the same name? You know, the David Bowie-fueled vehicle that helped launch Jennifer Connelly’s career? Well, it’s actually an adaptation of the 2005 award-winning bestseller by Kate Mosse, a 700-page work of commercial and historical fiction masquerading as a Holy Grail story....

Corporate sellout. That’s the epithet social media users have adopted to describe Bonobos in the wake of its recent sale to Walmart for $310 million, and why not? It’s a reaction that Dunn seemingly anticipated, which is why the Bonobos CEO (also soon to be SVP of Digital Consumer Brands for Walmart U.S. eCommerce) wrote a post on Medium defending his rationale for the deal. The problem is that the essay, generically titled “The Future of Brands,” is short on insight and long on faux-intellectual musings (“I have come to an odd belief, which is that we don’t make decisions so much as the decisions make us”) and obfuscating corporate speak....

Crain’s Chicago Business, taking note of the disappearance of Communication X9, a tall, multicolored sentinel of a sculpture that stood in front of the building at 150 N. Michigan that houses its office, reports that the family of the artist, Yaacov Agam, a 90-year-old Israeli living in Paris, is upset about it. Building management told Crain’s that the prominently located office building (across the street from the Cultural Center and Millennium Park), notable for its diagonally sliced diamond-shaped top, is going to look different after a renovation....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Wednesday, September 13, 2017. Blagojevich speaks out: It’s “liberating to not hold grudges” Former governor Rod Blagojevich has given interviews for the first time since entering prison in March 2012, speaking to reporters at NBC 5 and Chicago magazine. Blagojevich seems to be making the best of his 14-year sentence, helping fellow inmates get ready for job interviews, mopping floors, and performing with his band, the Jailhouse Rockers....

When describing Victory’s Banner, the all-veg breakfast-and-lunch sanctuary in Roscoe Village, “cozy” always comes to mind. It’s cozy from the outside, situated on a corner well traveled by strollers and ringed by green space. It’s cozy in its soft, pastel-hued decor. And it’s cozy in the warm politeness of the staff, all of whom are students of meditation and of Indian spiritual leader Sri Chinmoy. But perhaps the most reassuring element of Victory’s Banner is its consistency, epitomized in what the restaurant boasts to be “our most popular egg dish,” the Satisfaction-Promise....

For her atmospheric new album Postcards (Lustre) folk-pop singer Pieta Brown enlisted a wide variety of colleagues to help flesh out arrangements. She didn’t convene the disparate crew in a single recording studio, but instead sent out loose husks of her new material, inviting collaborators to finish off her ten songs. Some tracks are rustic, others nicely polished. “Stopped My Horse,” with singer-songwriter Carrie Rodriguez, conveys a rural drag with poky banjo and languid fiddle arcs, “Station Blues” “Station Blues” shuffles along thanks to drumming from Chad Cromwell, and “All the Roads,” featuring help from the Pines, is rich with a kind of ambient twang....

Don L. Lee was ten years old when his mother, Maxine, took him and his younger sister to visit the minister of one of the largest black churches in Detroit. It was mid-20th-century America, and, abandoned years before by her husband, Maxine, a beautiful, vivacious woman, had been trying to keep the family afloat with the odds stacked against her. Within a week, Maxine and her children were on the street....

Today is Bob Weir’s 68th birthday. Known and revered as a founding member of the Grateful Dead and one of the greatest rhythm guitarists of all time, Weir is an iconic member of the 1960s San Francisco free-love, acid-drenched hippie movement, and one hell of a songwriter. The Dead gets a lot of hate, largely due to the stigma of the Deadhead subculture—the stereotypical tie-dyed, stinky, burnt-out, hemp-adorned nomads who followed the band religiously until cofounding member Jerry Garcia died in 1995, and those who went on to worship their far inferior (and most of the time, just plain bad) jam-band successors....

The Chef: Aaron Mooney (Webster’s Wine Bar)The Challengers: Carlo and Melvin Vizconde (Kai Zan)The Ingredient: Shio koji Mooney used the shio koji to replace salt in an Asian-inspired dish: hamachi tartare with brined vegetables and sake-marinated citrus tobiko (flying fish roe). Because shio koji makes proteins caramelize faster, he says, he decided to serve the fish raw. He marinated it in a mixture of equal parts shio koji, lime juice, and olive oil for 15 minutes, explaining that he used the lime juice “to add a bright acidity and not so much of a sour acidity [from the shio koji]....

Dave Beran/Twitter Daniel Boulud congratulates Beard Award winner Dave Beran. The James Beard Foundation Awards had a year of women last night, with prizes going to celebrated woman chefs such as April Bloomfield (New York’s the Spotted Pig and the Breslin), Nancy Silverton (Pizzeria Mozza and a long history as a leading figure in bread baking), and Barbara Lynch (half a dozen restaurants in Boston)—but the Chicago portion of the awards didn’t have anything to do with that....

For all its talk of inclusion, the Fly Honey Show is not about subtlety, nor is it for minimalists. Now roaring into its ninth season, the ear-blisteringly loud, unabashedly proud, intersectional feminist extravaganza of spoken word, song, and dance claims some 300 ensemble members and 35 featured acts spreading their gospel of sex- and body-positivity and their multitude of legs over a five-week run at the Den. They promise 150 minutes, and they make you go a full 180....

Here’s a novel idea for Spike Lee, and even for Mayor Rahm Emanuel: instead of urging black women to withhold sex to stem violence in their communities, maybe we’d all be better off if elected officials of color (and their allies) stonewalled the City Council and state legislature until the disproportionately white, rich, and powerful enact policy changes that help curb police brutality and engender greater economic opportunities for at-risk populations in Chicago and the state of Illinois....

Wild Grass Wherever he is, I hope Alain Resnais is eating Cat Munchies right now—what a wonderful case that would be of afterlife imitating art. The last scene of Resnais’s Wild Grass (2009) is one of the most heroic movie moments I know, wherein the last authentic French surrealist (then 88 years old) resolves to go on fighting to the very end. If you haven’t seen the movie—or if you haven’t seen it on a big screen—do whatever you can to catch it at Doc Films this Thursday at 7 PM, where it’s being shown from 35-millimeter....

Gossip Wolf can’t think of a better cure for the inauguration blues than learning how to help local communities likely to be hurt by the goons in the Trump administration. Luckily, former Geronimo! front man Kelly Johnson, Kickstand Productions owner John Ugolini, and iO Chicago performer Jennifer Cumberworth have organized an all-day event at Beat Kitchen on Saturday, January 21, to give you a head start. No Walls: A Benefit for Marginalized Chicago Communities will feature a panel on getting involved in local politics, plus comedy, poetry, visual art, storytelling, and a concert that includes Troubled Hubble, the Avantist, postpunk three-piece No Men, and rap duo Mother Nature....

Watching a television pilot can be a lot like going on a first date. It starts off awkward. The jokes aren’t landing, the timing’s all wrong. Maybe you drink a little more than usual hoping some good ol’ social lubricant can provide the situation with the sheen that it’s so desperately lacking. But you’re an optimist, a Pollyanna, a firm believer in the better angels of our nature. Just give it another chance, you think, and surely things will get better....

Bea Cordelia and Daniel Kyri are the creators, producers, directors, and stars of The T, a new webseries based on their own lives about the friendship between Jo, a white trans woman from the north side of Chicago, and Carter, a black queer man from the south side. The show premiered with a screening last month at the Chicago Cultural Center, where they filmed part of The T. The Chicago landmark sits across Randolph Street from where the two first connected almost a decade ago....

Gauguin: Artist as Alchemist,” a new survey of Paul Gauguin’s oeuvre at the Art Institute, aims to disrupt the familiar association of Tahitian motifs with his work: full-bodied, brown-skinned women, sandy beaches, lush landscapes, tranquil waters. This is a noble and necessary endeavor because Gauguin’s output consists of so much more than his well-known painting. Here a thorough collection of objects, didactic texts, and historical frames provides much-needed context to Gauguin’s place in the art-history canon....

Sharon Jones Earlier this week we premiered Tattoos, the nervy new EP from local rock outfit Coaster, and on Saturday the band will celebrate its release with a show at Township (listen to it here until then). If you want to see a good show and for some reason that doesn’t suit your fancy there are plenty of others to pick from the next few days. “There’s a certain panache to a band name like Tweens—and this young Cincinnati trio sounds just like you’d figure,” writes Kevin Warwick....