Despite the current deep freeze, we’ve had a remarkably mild—some would say anemic—winter so far. (Thanks, climate change.) Still, there have already been a couple of nasty sleet- and snowstorms, and for days afterward, you didn’t have to look hard to find unshoveled sidewalks and impassable bike lanes. Last winter, a challenging season that included our city’s fifth-heaviest recorded snowfall, CDOT wrote only 226 citations for failure to shovel. Meanwhile, Evanston, with about 1/36th the population of Chicago, issued 53 tickets for noncompliance, according to Evanston city staffer Carl Caneva....

ARTIST: Bill Connors SHOW: Windy City Soul Club at Logan Square Auditorium on Mon 12/31 MORE INFO: instagram.com/billconnors

The “architectural performance” Superpowers of Ten was performed in front of five sold-out audiences last weekend, packing the Tank, the newly renovated exhibition space on the first floor of the Chicago Athletic Association on Michigan Avenue. The performance was a narrated rendition of Powers of Ten and the Relative Size of Things in the Universe, Charles and Ray Eameses’ nine-minute-long film from 1977 that explored the distance from deep space to an atom found in the palm of a hand through linear jumps in space measured by increasing and decreasing powers of ten....

Despite a running time that could put you at risk of deep vein thrombosis, Sean Graney’s 12-hour All Our Tragic is primarily an exercise in compression. The production—which is the first to be staged at the Hypocrites’ new space on the ground floor of the Den Theatre—is a loose adaptation of all 32 surviving Greek tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. As in his previous adaptations of Shakespeare and other canonical authors, Graney exhibits zero interest in pleasing purists....

The Reader’s archive is vast and varied, going back to 1971. Every week in Archive Dive, we’ll dig through and bring up some finds. It’s been nearly 13 years since the final episode of Soul Train aired, and right around the time the long-running series ended, Chris Lehman published A Critical History of Soul Train on Television. Among other things, the book looks at Soul Train‘s Chicago roots, including a local version of the show that continued to exist after it hit big in Los Angeles....

AP Photos Sure, some fans—and journalists—are hoping Carmelo Anthony signs with the Bulls. But when did Chicagoans become a bunch of beggars? Just asking: Page three of Wednesday’s Tribune includes a story about a mansion for sale in Lincoln Park for $18.75 million, “making it the city’s highest-priced single-family home listing.”

Our living links to the golden age of hard bop have seriously dwindled over the last couple of decades, making the continued vitality and drive of Detroit-bred pianist Barry Harris, 87, all the more special. As a performer and educator he’s championed the music on which he cut his teeth—and now with so few of his colleagues remaining, a sound that might’ve seemed old-fashioned has become invaluable. Before relocating to New York in the mid-50s he was a busy pickup player for touring heavies, supporting the likes of Miles Davis with a rhythmic thrust that he learned from a rigorous absorption of recordings by Bud Powell, an influence that shaped his vaunted career....

2338 N. Milwaukee coleschicago.com Runner-Up Skylark

3408 N. Clark 773-248-6613 Runner-Up Big Star

The gatekeepers of hip-hop will tell you Atlanta is the culture’s spiritual home, and rapper Lil Baby, who was born there in 1994, has been reaping its benefits through osmosis. He grew up in the same neighborhood as Pierre “Pee” Thomas, one of the cofounders of Quality Control Music (Migos and Lil Yachty), before the latter launched the now celebrated indie hip-hop label. When Baby decided he wanted to give music a try, after serving two years of a five-year sentence for selling drugs, QC picked him up....

On an early July evening, Uber invited legislators, journalists, and business types into the cavernous confines of its midwest headquarters in the West Loop. Besides showing off the impressive new space, the ride-share juggernaut was unveiling some ambitious plans for the future. Following a video presentation fraught with attractive young people, inclusive refrains—We’re all just people trying to get from one place to another, maaan—and a dose of tech worship, midwest general manager Andrew Macdonald took the mike to inform the crowd that Chicago is the lucky locale of serious ride-share growth....

If you went to bed early last night you might have since woken up to “Angels,” a new song from Chance the Rapper. Those of you who were staying up until dawn surfing the web (or watching The Late Show With Stephen Colbert) could have easily heard “Angels” before falling asleep, and maybe the song’s bright, gleeful energy was the perfect soundtrack for the sunrise. I certainly felt that way after I dashed to grab “Angels,” which, like May’s Surf—an album by Chance’s band, the Social Experiment, and its leader, Nico Segal, aka Donnie Trumpet—was immediately available for a free download on iTunes....

The “Belt noodle Yibin style” at Bixi Beer is one of the best bowls of pasta I’ve eaten all year. I don’t care that it’s a black-market merger of two different regional Chinese noodle dishes; the chewy, wide Shanxi-province biang biang noodles—like steroidal pappardelle—tangle adaptably well amid funky black beans, pickled mustard greens, chopped peanuts, and the electric ma la buzz that together make up the MO of the southeastern Sichuanese dish they’re named for....

A 2013 Resident Advisor profile of Detroit producer Manuel Gonzales latched on to a particular phrase he’d used to describe his music: “It’s kind of punk.” Gonzales, who records and performs as M Gun, likes his techno and electro with serrated edges, convulsive synths, and corrosive percussion. But as harsh as his music can be, Gonzales never lets his affection for aggressive tones disrupt his ability to lure people into a trance—and get them moving....

The minute Rihanna jacked some aquamarine imagery from seapunk for her performance on Saturday Night Live in the fall of 2012 it was pretty clear that the electronic URL microscene wouldn’t be the same thing it was when it broke on Tumblr the previous year. That hasn’t stopped me from counting “seapunks” at festivals* and it also hasn’t stopped the scene’s originators from moving on. Take seapunk blogfather Ultrademon, who recently released his second album, Voidic Charms; the tune that’s caught my ear is “Drive U Crazy,” a track that reminds me more of house than seapunk (even though seapunk incorporates elements of house)....

An attempt at a clever conceit, Red Theater’s An Oak Tree pairs two actors, one who has rehearsed the script (an engaging Gage Wallace), and another who has never seen the material before. The second actor changes with every performance; I saw the talented Cruz Gonzalez-Citadel. The setup, opening with a recording of “O Fortuna” from Carmina Burana, implies dramatic risk; that the visiting actor is flying without a safety net opens up the possibility for surprising discoveries or agonizing mistakes....

Last Tuesday, just before the Chicago Police Department released the video of officer Jason Van Dyke shooting 17-year-old Laquan McDonald to death, the Chicago Public Schools sent out a letter to all parents and guardians. Signed by chief education officer Janice K. Jackson, it announced that the video would not be shown in CPS schools but that counseling would be available for traumatized students and a “toolkit” was being prepared for students to initiate conversations at home....

Rogers Park Runner-Up Uptown

OK, it’s not technically a peninsula, but it sure feels like it. The 199-acre park is tucked just south of where the Calumet River flows into Lake Michigan, behind a proud old residential part of the East Side neighborhood. Trails weave through its fields and woods, around playgrounds and tennis courts, and on a midafternoon jaunt the city seems far away—even though you can see the downtown skyline from spots along the lake, and the Horseshoe Casino and steel mills along the shore to the southeast....

When we heard “David Bowie Is” was coming to the Museum of Contemporary Art, there was no way we were not going to go. It was a moral obligation for Bowie superfan Brianna Wellen, and Aimee Levitt was curious if the exhibit would be the revolutionary combination of sight and sound it was hyped to be. BW: The “Starman” setup was particularly wonderful for that because it incorporated the song, the video, and the costume....