On the day of his appearance at the Chicago Public Library, author T. Coraghessan Boyle was feeling remarkably chipper—a little pumped, even. Not because of the weather—it was a nasty Tuesday, gusty and cold, dark as the center of the earth by 6 PM, when the event was to begin. And not because he’d be back to California anytime soon. No, this was an early stop in the long slog of a book tour that would take him across the country and over the ocean, facing one audience after another, their freshly purchased hard-cover copies of his new novel—The Women, a riff on the life of Frank Lloyd Wright—balanced on their knees, waiting for the main event: the post-talk signing....

Barbecue and soul food seem like they should go together as harmoniously as Peaches & Herb, but it doesn’t always work out that way. In fact, there’s a bit of a culture clash there. Serious pit masters couldn’t care less about side dishes—fries and white bread are about as elaborate as they bother to get. And soul food places often look at true wood-smoked barbecue as a backwoods prima donna, demanding outsize space and attention while adding only a couple items to an already long cafeteria line....

A year and a half ago, Wafaa Bilal made himself one of Chicago’s best-known artists when he shut himself in a room at Flatfile Galleries in front of a paintball gun. The gun could be controlled remotely, over the Internet, and Web surfers and gallery visitors alike could aim and fire it, blasting Bilal with yellow paint. By the end of the project, titled Domestic Tension, more than 60,000 people had shot at him from more than 130 countries, and he had been featured in media outlets from NPR to Newsweek....

Q I’m a woman in my 20s, and I’ve been dating the love of my life for two years now. We are incredibly happy except for—guess!—we have different sex drives. When we first started dating, I initiated sex all the time and enjoyed it, but as soon as I started on birth control, my libido evaporated. After a nightmarish year of trying different methods, arguing with doctors, and hurt feelings, I decided that it wasn’t worth it, and we’ve stopped using any hormonal birth control (we’re using condoms)....

The most impressive thing about the Green Party’s national nominating convention, held at Symphony Center July 10-13, might’ve been how multiracial it was. In the crowd, black nationalists and young activists of all colors mingled with white hippies. Fiery former congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, who’s African-American, was named the Greens’ presidential candidate, and Rosa Clemente, a Latina hip-hop activist and journalist from New York, was slated for vice president. The Greens have been active in Pilsen for the last eight years....

New media have brought us a new age of miracles. A complete unknown, a Susan Boyle, can sing a song on a TV talent show and awake an international heroine. Fame hasn’t spread so swiftly since the early 15th century, when Joan of Arc was an anonymous peasant one day and leader of the French army approximately the next. But where does this leave the merchant without a great story—let’s say the grocer who wants to tell shoppers that this weekend’s loss leader is two bags of carrots for the price of one?...

friday29 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Good Stuff House If ever there were a band made to play a festival called Fugue State–a term describing a dissociative state of consciousness–it’s Good Stuff House. On the forthcoming Endless Bummer (Root Strata), Matt Christensen, Mike Weis (both of Zelienople), and Scott Tuma (Boxhead Ensemble, Souled American) use familiar instruments like guitar, drums, harmonica, and clarinet as well as homemade contraptions like the Vibrachime (a repurposed church bell) to layer languid melodies and atmospheric drones atop a mix of lo-fi recordings (people at a Brazilian train station, their own voices, et cetera)....

Last week, with a deal pending that would turn the mostly empty Ryerson steel plant on the west side into a film production studio, I talked to Cornell University professor Susan Christopherson. The potential buyers for the property want financial help from the city and the state, and Christopherson has been studying film-industry subsidies for a couple decades. Her major paper on the subject, “The Creative Economy as Big Business,” will be published in the Winter 2010 Journal of Planning Education and Research....

Matt Liston’s Chasing October is less a documentary than a phantasmagoria about the fever dream that was the Cubs’ 2003 season — you remember, the one that ended with Steve Bartman’s muff, Alex Gonzalez’s error, and the Florida Marlins advancing to beat the New York Yankees in the World Series. No movie that opens with the ghost of Harry Caray telling the filmmaker the Cubs will make the World Series if only everyone will “Just Believe” can be taken as the unvarnished truth....

Refuge: Center for Artists in Recovery started out three years ago as the personal project of businessman-in-recovery Bill Current. Though the name conjures up a pricey private hospital staffed by social workers and shrinks, it’s something else entirely—a quirky Skokie art gallery, occupying the front half of a building shared by Current’s equally oddly named corporate design firm, Asylum. Refuge offers artists who’ve struggled with addiction the therapy of a gallery wall and reconnection to the world....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’m sure I must’ve listened to the Boston trio the Slip sometime in the late 90s, but my patience for jam bands is nil, and by the time I received the recent solo debut from Slip guitarist Brad Barr, The Fall Apartment: Instrumental Guitar (Tompkins Square), I’d forgotten what they sounded like. The Fall Apartment is so good, however, that I felt compelled to give his main band another shot....

There’s a toy manufacturer named Hasbro. They’re best known for making G.I. Joe, Rubik’s Cube, and Baby Alive. Believe it or not, Hasbro has a direct communication line to the spiritual world. I’m talking about the Ouija board. Hasbro makes that, too. And for one summer we used it to talk to our friend Danny. “Check it out,” he said. He sat down next to us on the brown plaid couch that once belonged to my grandma....

The West Town Chicago Chamber of Commerce presents the inaugural Green Music Festival this Saturday and Sunday in Eckhart Park, 1330 W. Chicago. The fest runs from noon till 10 PM each day, with solid bills of top-notch indie rock beginning at 2:30 PM. Art Brut (who also play Subterranean on Friday) and Tapes ‘n Tapes headline Saturday, after sets by Say Hi, Maritime, Sybris, Elsinore, and Brilliant Pebbles. Lucero (who also play Subterranean on Saturday) and Murder by Death headline Sunday, after sets by These United States, Catfish Haven, the Saps, the Minneapolis Henrys, and Canasta....

A guy I know e-mailed me: “Every now and then, something turns me into a crank, and today it’s Frank James posing the question in The Swamp “Will new Iraq turmoil reverse public support?” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There’s no room for nuance in a headline. Headlines tend to be categorical, even over stories written by reporters who were careful not to be....

From National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978) and Caddyshack (1980) to Stripes (1981) and Ghostbusters (1984), Harold Ramis perfected a comedy genre with a deceptively simplistic formula: lovable characters who are considered losers rebel against the establishment and save the day with their goofball high jinks. Growing up in what was called “the Second City,” you always felt like you were on the outside looking in. New York and LA were the real centers of culture in America, and we were kind of a sideshow....

Sport and Strategy DRD’s play in 2009 forced the country’s top teams to both learn it and learn how to counter it within the rule set. In 2010, those teams added it to the known strategies. The sheer skating talent and strategy that it takes is amazing. Packs began to speed up again. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » RMRG can and does play at any speed, within the rules, and to the benefit of the team....

If you know Craig Wright’s name it’s most likely because you’ve run across it in the credits for Six Feet Under, Lost, Brothers & Sisters, or Dirty Sexy Money—he wrote and produced for all four TV shows and created the last. Michael Shannon you’re more likely to recognize on the street; his performance in the film version of Revolutionary Road got him nominated for best supporting actor at the Oscars. Both men have succeeded in electronic media, but both have also been attentive to Mother Theater, coming back to visit her regularly even though they could be doing other, more lucrative things....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » How can a poor man stand such times and live? Music will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no music. But music journalism, like all journalism–at least the kind you can still read by candlelight if you don’t make your electric bill–can’t finance itself with dedication, and lots of print outlets are hurting bad....

Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury The recent release of this collection honoring Ray Bradbury couldn’t have been timed better: it was in the works several months before the celebrated author died in June, and Bradbury even signed a few copies. In his brief introduction to the book, Bradbury reflects on how the son has become the father: he says he regarded Edgar Allan Poe and other authors as “papas”, and now Margaret Atwood, Audrey Niffenegger, Joe Meno, Dave Eggers, Neil Gaiman, and other illustrious writers have penned short stories in tribute to him....

Adaptor-directors Jessica Thebus and Frank Maugeri have reduced The Tempest down to its essential narrative elements and reframed them as kind of meditation, reminiscent of nothing so much as Krapp’s Last Tape by Samuel Beckett. Like Krapp, Shakespeare’s exiled Prospero is seen as a lonely old man poring over his story—playing it out for himself as if he were about to die and wanted finally to get it clear in his head....