shutterstock.com Every summer, I volunteer as a band coach and teach little kids how to play music at Girls Rock! Chicago. And every year, someone inevitably quits the band—usually it’s only for five minutes, but still. My first year at GR!C, I wasn’t expecting this situation. The band I was coaching had been working for almost a week in preparation for a showcase where they’d only get to perform one song....

Garage Rep Steppenwolf Theatre Company Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » He does so without snickers or condemnation, framing Brandes and Meiwes as a couple of hopeless—if psychically damaged—romantics who’ve simply taken metaphors about love at face value. Theirs is a literally consuming passion; they want to become one, to possess and be possessed by each other in the most elemental sense. Brandes insists that there must be nothing left of him when Meiwes is done—he wants Meiwes to smash him to powder and breathe him in....

You guffaw at bombings. Atrocities. Attempted suicide. You hate yourself. But in your defense, Guerra: A Clown Play—performed by the Mexico City-based troupe La Piara in collaboration with Chicago writer-directors Seth Bockley and Devon de Mayo—just might be the funniest take on the military since Dr. Strangelove. At a distant outpost, a flirtatious general and his runty, Chaplin-esque subordinate fill their days with flag-raising and medal-awarding ceremonies. Then an exciting new war is announced!...

Shoes, the power-pop pride of northern Illinois, have been DIY since BTWWB (Before This Wolf Was Born), which in this case means 1974. Apart from a brief stint on Elektra in the late 70s and early 80s (which in 1979 netted them their only brush with the Billboard top 50) the boys from Zion have recorded mostly at home studios and released their catchy, tightly wound, and incredibly harmonious music almost exclusively on their own label, Black Vinyl....

CHE Part 1: the argentine, CHE PART 2: GUERRILLA ss Directed by Steven Soderbergh Written by Peter Buchman and Benjamin A. van der Veen Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » With The Motorcycle Diaries (2004), director Walter Salles neatly sidestepped this challenge by confining himself to the prerevolutionary Guevara (Gael Garcia Bernal), an Argentine medical student bumming around South America. The narrow historical parameters enabled Salles to indulge the idealized view of Guevara as a patron saint of the poor, and the movie grossed $57 million worldwide....

The Dog Joint New hot dog stand also offering burgers, Italian beef, and skin-on french fries. While it normally closes at 8 PM Sunday through Thursday, it stays open till 11 PM on nights when there’s a show at the nearby Park West. Cash only, with an ATM on the premises. Location, location, location. This little organic hot dog and ice cream shop across from Welles Park may not seem like much, but with its kid-friendly menu of sausages and well-pedigreed sweets, traffic is all but guaranteed....

Justin Broadrick has long since moved away from the brutalizing industrial grind that made early Godflesh so lovable, but by pointing it out I don’t mean to say that yet another guy who used to tear my face off with his records is now a middle-aged wuss. Some of Godflesh’s signature sounds crop up from time to time in Jesu–the guitar tone like high-tension cables whistling in a gale, the grotty bass like a chain saw finding bone–and even on the new Conqueror (Hydra Head), the band’s fourth and most tuneful record, the foundation is an implacable, bludgeoning beat and massive distorted chords that shift like antarctic ice sheets....

The much buzzed-about Ing (951 W. Fulton, 855-834-6464, ingrestaurant.com), the latest project from Moto chef Homaro Cantu, opened on Tuesday in the former Otom space. General manager and sommelier Garrett Kern said that the noodles, which will be hand pulled at a noodle station, have been in the works the longest of all the menu components. Executive chef Thomas Bowman‘s contemporary Asian menu is divided into categories like Heating (e.g., oysters with uni, foie gras, and smoke), Boiling (three types of noodle soup), Melting (Wagyu beef cooked on a “firebrick” and served with ponzu and a soy rice krispie), and Sweetening (waffles frozen in a waffle iron soaked in liquid nitrogen and served with coconut, mango sorbet, and stout)....

Eason always takes my calls, which I interpret as a sign that whatever happens, we’ll always have Julius Meinl. For the same reason, I don’t like making those calls. In a perfect world—no, in a marginally less imperfect world—I would commiserate with everyone I know at Creative Loafing who’s feeling beaten down by events and not write about the company at all. Certainly I can’t begin to feign disinterest in what happens to it—the auction will have an enormous impact on the future of the Reader, which I’ve been connected to in one way or another since the first issue in 1971, and of everyone who works around me in this little shop....

Space 425 square feet | Rent $650 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Costa, a photographer and musician, first saw the apartment a few years ago, when a friend was living in it. He was splitting time between Chicago and Santiago, Chile, and when he decided to settle here on a more permanent basis he found that it was up for grabs. He liked the idea of having a small, affordable place that would be easy to keep up if he decided to travel again....

I’m a 47-year-old man and my wife is 49. We got married four years ago. Two days ago, she came back from the doctor and told me she has genital herpes. I am floored. She said she just found out. She said she must have contracted it years ago and never had an outbreak until ten days ago. She has been to the doctor countless times over the last 20 years....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bruno Wizard, leader and sole remaining original member of legendarily obscure punks The Homosexuals, is probably the greatest rock frontman you’ve never heard of. I caught the group on Thursday afternoon at the Rusty Spoke, which Wizard announced was the first actual gay bar he’d ever had the honor to play in. He and his stellar new band ripped through what can be called “the hits” only very generously....

“We think there is such great benefit to this—that’s why we’ve spent so much time on it,” says Suzanne Malec-McKenna, commissioner of the Chicago Department of Environment. “The perception is that with this we could bring polluted soil into our communities, but the reality is that this is the soil you’d find in any backyard in Chicago.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Under the city’s proposal, the dirt dug up through city road, sewer, school, library, and park construction projects could simply be taken to another construction site where it’s needed—as long as tests prove it’s no more contaminated than what’s already there....

NYC art-star photographer Ryan McGinley, who in 2003 became the youngest artist to ever have a solo show at the Whitney, has apparently found a new muse in Smith Westerns front man Cullen Omori. Gossip Wolf hears McGinley took a multitude of snaps of Omori hanging around the Pitchfork festival site. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tortoise drummer John McEntire, sax man Paul Mertens, and cellist Alison Chesley of Helen Money lent a local air to Broken Social Scene this weekend, jamming with the Canadian ork-pop collective during their Fleetwood Mac-inspired Friday-night set at Pitchfork; all three musicians appear on the band’s recent Forgiveness Rock Record....

Ethan Hawke under lockdown in The Purge The new horror movie The Purge is built around a remarkable image: a cookie-cutter mansion is transformed into a fortress, with steel blockades over all the doors and windows, so a well-to-do American family can ignore the wave of horrible violence passing through their gated community. It’s the sort of image that studio filmmaking is so good at creating, rich in associations and unmarried to any clear political ideology....

Friday | Saturday | Sunday Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The music this year runs the gamut from buzzed-about newcomers like Sleigh Bells and Delorean to established veterans like Modest Mouse and Raekwon, playing everything from garage-inflected pop (Girls, Smith Westerns) to hip-hop (Big Boi, Freddie Gibbs) to dance music (Dam-Funk, LCD Soundsystem). Sunday night’s main attraction is the temporarily reunited Pavement, avatars of the kind of indie rock Pitchfork is famous for championing—their best-of set Quarantine the Past got a perfect 10....

Happy Now?, Katherine Shonk’s first novel, came out in hardcover in the spring of 2010 and in paperback a year later. Though it received glowing reviews in the New York Times and Publishers Weekly, among other places, it didn’t get nearly the attention it deserved. True, it was a physically small book, and rather than striving for grand Great American Novel-worthy themes, it concerned itself with domestic details: a few weeks in the life of Claire Kessler, a Chicago artist, after her husband, Jay, jumped off the balcony of a downtown apartment building on Valentine’s Day....

CLERIC REGRESSIONS (WEB OF MIMICRY) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “A Rush of Blood” includes tumbling shards of piano, a pell-mell seesawing lick that accelerates like Wile E. Coyote on roller skates, and slingshot swoops of guitar whose pitch climbs to a degraded digital whistle. One riff in “Cumberbund” works like a crude musical palindrome, descending and slowing down, then climbing in pitch and speeding back up....

Dear Cecil: When your question came in, Ale, I thought: At last, a chance to have it out with E.L. Doctorow. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You remember the opening of Doctorow’s award-winning 1989 novel Billy Bathgate, right? (Play along here, slackers.) Evil crime lord Dutch Schultz motors across New York harbor in a tugboat while a henchman sticks the feet of doomed underling Bo Weinberg into a tub of concrete in preparation for shoving him overboard....

Stamping Ground is proof that the world just keeps getting smaller. One of three pieces offered by Aspen Santa Fe Ballet—an American repertory company specializing in European contemporary dance—the 1983 work by Czech-born, Netherlands-based choreographer Jií Kylián honors the aboriginal dance he saw in Australia. But his freewheeling take on the tribal also echoes Monty Python’s “Ministry of Silly Walks” sketch and Pilobolus’s human pretzels. Performed in silence except for stomping and body slaps, the opening solos gradually turn funny....