International pop-up party Boiler Room has enlisted some of the best producers and DJs to play RSVP-only parties in intimate spaces; the performances are then broadcast around the world. If you haven’t made it out to one of Boiler Room’s shows just yet you can get a sneak peek of the hubbub and easily lose several hours by scrolling through archival footage of past performances from heavy hitters such as Frankie Knuckles and Teklife masters DJ Rashad, DJ Spinn, RP Boo, and Manny....

As city officials call for better enforcement of Chicago’s vacation rental ordinance, renting out rooms could get more complicated for hosts. Aldermen Michele Smith (43rd Ward), Brian Hopkins (Second), and Brendan Reilly (42nd) have called for a crackdown on violations of the city’s existing vacation rental ordinance. Though Smith said doing so could bring in an estimated $2 million annually, it’s not clear if the city can effectively enforce the ordinance....

Mika Horibuchi’s paintings trick the mind into seeing what is not quite there. At first glance they’re nothing more than romanticized watercolors of landscapes or still lifes of fruit and flowers. The subject, however, isn’t where the trick lies: It’s in the materials she uses in their rendering. The paintings aren’t formed from light splashes of watercolor, but rather smears of oil paint. Despite their everyday subject matter, the paintings are part of Horibuchi’s most recent and most personal series: they are copies of her grandmother’s own hobbyist watercolors....

“People consider me someone who knows a lot about spirits, but I have to admit that my experience had not included a true introduction to three-penis wine,” Michael Rubel (Henry’s Swing Club) says of the ingredient with which Violet Hour bartender Patrick Smith challenged him to create a cocktail. Smith—”someone I thought was my friend,” Rubel says—found a bottle of the Chinese rice wine at a store in Chinatown and personally delivered it to Rubel....

LEON NEAL/AFP/Getty Images Protesters demonstrate outside Nigeria House in London on May 9 to demand the return of more than 200 Nigerian schoolgirls abducted by the Boko Haram Islamist group. A newspaper column we have read a thousand times and will read a thousand more (providing newspaper columns continue to be written) is the one that sprays Windex on a matter we supposed was clear enough and invites us to take another look....

ARTIST: Josh Davis SHOW: Fuzz, Walter, and Oozing Wound at Thalia Hall on Fri 11/20 MORE INFO: deadmeatdesign.com

Justin Broadrick already has a lifetime’s worth of incredibly heavy music behind him. In 1985, at age 16, the Birmingham native played guitar with UK grindcore pioneers Napalm Death; in 1986 he joined noise-rock band Head of David; and in 1988 he cofounded Godflesh, an ice-cold, beastly, drum-machine-driven band that helped lay the groundwork for industrial metal before dissolving in 2002. For much of the past decade, Broadrick has focused on relatively pretty music, mainly with electronic project Final and lush postmetal band Jesu, but even his beautiful soundscapes and earnest, heartfelt melodies have the mass and density he first learned to wield as a teen....

For the past decade, under a seemingly endless list of names, Chicago experimentalist Angel Marcloid has spread her tendrils across vast stretches of the world of noise and electronic music. Her diverse sonic identities—the hazily fluid, manipulated new-age sounds of Mindspring Memories, the more unsettling work she does under her own name or as Pregnant Spore—intersect but rarely significantly overlap. With a distinctive retrofuturistic aesthetic (which predates the vaporwave craze) that she fuses with a modern reinterpretation of older styles, Marcloid has carved out her own place in experimental music without rendering herself inaccessible to curious listeners....

1519 W. Warren, 312-660-1354 After a $22 million renovation, the old Viceroy Hotel on the near-west side reopened last year in stunning fashion. The architects behind the renovation, Landon Bone Baker, have restored the terra-cotta facade and the arched ceilings inside. The building originally opened in 1930 as the Union Park Hotel (because it faces Union Park), with 175 cramped rooms, most furnished with wall beds. It was renamed the Viceroy in 1963 and designated a landmark by the city in 2010....

4662 N. Broadway 42gramschicago.com Runner-Up Jeremy Leven of Tuesday Night Dinner

Last year I moved from Evanston to Albany Park, and serendipitously my radio options changed. For decades I’ve appreciated the wide-ranging, unconstrained programming on local college and community stations, but I never spent much time actually listening to them, even during the years I hosted an international-music program on Loyola University’s WLUW. Maybe I couldn’t hear one station because I was too far from the transmitter, or missed out on another because I lived in a signal shadow cast by tall buildings....

ARTIST: Dan MacAdam SHOW: A Jason Molina Celebration at the Hideout on Sat 7/22 MORE INFO: crosshairchicago.com

It’s a highly questionable theory, but Cajun food is often considered to be the less sophisticated rural analogue to cosmopolitan creole cuisine. If you subscribe to that idea, you might have been among the many who did a double take when you learned that the much-anticipated Logan Square cocktail bar Analogue, helmed by two Violet Hour vets, would be serving a tightly focused food menu that includes things like gumbo, po’boys, dirty rice, and biscuits....

Runner-Up Rogers Park

5404 N. Clark and other locations 773-271-9382 howardbrown.org/hb_brownelephant.asp Runner-Up Unique

4400 S. Western What would Joyce Kilmer make of the tree on the grassy boulevard in Brighton Park? A tree that gleams at God all day, and lifts her pots and pans to pray? Besides soup pots and frying pans, Mike’s Pan Tree (or Pantry—get it?) has coffee urns, a Thermos, pie tins, tea kettles, colanders, a rusty ladle, soup spoons, and sink strainers welded to 400-series stainless-steel tubing. And in its crown is a stainless-steel kitchen sink....

As a kid living in Laguna, a province in the Philippines, Janette Santos always looked forward to the large cardboard boxes that her aunt sent from Chicago. These boxes were big, sometimes even bigger than moving boxes, and typically arrived at her doorstep during the holidays. As she opened them, she caught a whiff of a familiar detergent smell that Filipinos who have received boxes from the U.S. describe as the scent of “imported goods” or of “America....

Chances Dances launched a decade ago as a queer dance party with a focus on inclusivity. It’s now evolved into a multifaceted collective that not only hosts well-DJed parties (a transcendent remix of Kate Bush’s “This Woman’s Work” comes to mind) but also awards microgrants to artists and supports Chicago’s LGBTIQ communities in myriad ways. The group’s ideology and history is explored in an exhibition at Gallery 400—part of a citywide anniversary celebration entitled “Platforms: 10 Years of Chances Dances....

Local artist and author Emil Ferris’s My Favorite Thing is Monsters is a knotty, richly drawn graphic novel that blends memoir, pulp horror, detective fiction, and historical drama. It’s set on mock notebook pages—like Syllabus, a recent comic from former longtime Reader contributor Lynda Barry. Ferris uses panels and word balloons in My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, but an equal amount of space is given to illustrations of a type more often seen in children’s storybooks....