I showed up at Phantom Manor Recording owner/engineer Mike Lust’s home at 5 PM on a Sunday. I purposely arranged our meeting for late in the day to make it easy on him—he is, after all, the person who taught me the Number One Rule of Rock: no phone calls before 11 AM. Lust answered the door wearing a luxurious bathrobe over a significantly less luxurious T-shirt, holding an Ellen coffee mug of chardonnay....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I was reminded of that moment a few weeks ago at the 33rd edition of TIFF, when I took a break from movies about incest, prostitution, torture, and ethnic cleansing to catch a modest indie set in Chicago. Who Do You Love, directed by multiple Tony Award winner Jerry Zaks, tells the story of the legendary Chess Records label and its founders, Leonard and Phil Chess (played, respectively, by Alessandro Nivola and Jon Abrahams)....

Syrian-born wedding singer turned global underground pop sensation Omar Souleyman is something of a favorite amongst Reader music critics, not only for his frenetic, Casio-based interpretations of traditional Middle Eastern party music but also for the crazy amounts of charisma that even his most lo-fi recordings crackle with. He’s also something of a favorite amongst tasteful alt music types—he’s recorded with Gorillaz and done remix work for Bjork. Most recently he’s teamed up with Kieran Hebden, aka avant-dance producer and DJ Four Tet, for an entire album entitled Wenu Wenu that comes out October 22 on the Ribbon label....

Mike Sula Eric May’s red-flannel hash On Saturday, Friend of the Food Chain Eric May threw a pop-up tribute to Leo’s Lunchroom at the Piranha Club. Through the late 80s and early 90s, the Wicker Park diner was pretty much the only place you could eat in its immediate surroundings on Division. But it was much more than that. A hangout for artists, musicians, and assorted neighborhood weirdos in the heady days of pre- and mid-gentrification Wicker Park, it served an eclectic and mostly delicious pan-global assortment of budget-friendly food, cooked by Donna Knezek, who went on to Bite and Feed, and has since relocated to Albuquerque....

Q I’m a 30-year-old woman, married for five years to a man eight years my senior. Lately I’ve become more aware that I’m turned on by the idea of bondage, specifically men locked up in chastity devices. I’m ashamed of myself because it seems, well, pretty perverse and disturbed. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » No relationship lasts unless both partners are willing to bite their tongues from time to time in the interest of keeping the peace....

Crocheting mats for the homeless using yarn (ahem, “plarn”) made from discarded plastic shopping bags is a brilliant idea. Ruth Werstler, founder of the local volunteer group New Life for Old Bags, admits she didn’t exactly come up with it. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In late 2009, her father saw a local news report about a group of elderly women in Palatine who were making the mats and e-mailed her a link to the story....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The city doesn’t have enough money for its usual snow and ice removal, but this morning it’s asking the City Council’s Committee on Finance to approve “A communication recommending a proposed substitute ordinance concerning the authority to acquire property located at 2929 South Ellis Avenue”–that is, an $86 million deal to buy the site of now-shuttered Michael Reese Hospital with plans to turn it into the Olympic Village....

Say you’re the sort of person who calls a sandwich a “sando.” I’m the sort who will instinctively cringe at your oafish approach. That’s just one small thing that peeved me in advance of my time spent at Dragon Ranch. The new Asian-inspired barbecue joint is the creation of Rockit Ranch Productions, the same group that brought you such concentrated animal feeding operations as Rockit Bar & Grill and Sunda, as well as the militarized meat market Underground....

I admire a gallant crusade as much as the next guy, but StopBigMedia.com has the ring of an army raised to fight the last war. Why should anyone in Chicago take up arms against big media when big media’s already falling apart on its own? StopBigMedia.com is run by Free Press, a Washington-based “national, nonpartisan organization working to reform the media.” Rooting around its Web sites, StopBigMedia.com and freepress.net, I came across a video link to a speech Bill Moyers gave at the National Conference for Media Reform, presented by Free Press in June in Minneapolis....

In this comedy about megachurch Protestantism, a fallen pastor is eulogized by two underlings while other congregants tease the audience with confessional lines like “Who among us hasn’t gone online and sold your wife’s titty milk?” There are some nice touches with the music (“Awesome God”), jargon (“Praise God” and “Hallelujah” are uttered often), and homophobia; there’s even an anti-Christian lurking in the parking lot who proclaims that “literalists are literally retarded....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Her angelic voice glides through her slow-moving songs like a ghost, a sweet, gauzy presence cut from an altogether different cloth than the laconic guitar figures that swirl beneath. Her style reminds me of the druggy incantations of Mazzy Star’s Hope Sandoval, except her timbre isn’t as low and smoky. There are times when I’d like to hear her really belt one out, but even on a song like the uncharacteristically drum-heavy “Mary Come Alive,” Nadler’s reverb-draped singing is weightlessly ethereal....

thursday31 Thursday31 Black KeysVon FreemanGirl TalkMargot & the Nuclear So and So’sPrefuse 73Urge OverkillWhite Blue Yellow & Clouds Friday1 Black KeysVon Freeman Saturday2 Von Freeman Tuesday5 Von FreemanButch Walker Wednesday6 DKV TrioButch Walker VON FREEMAN See Tuesday. Freeman plays with saxist Ed Petersen, pianist Willie Pickens, bassist Brian Sandstrom, and drummer Robert Shy. 8:30 PM, Green Mill, 4802 N. Broadway, 773-878-5552, $25. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » GIRL TALK Even when mashups were the new hotness, most of ’em left me cold....

In 2004 Brett Neveu gave us American Dead, his drama about Lewie—a pleasant but shattered former house painter who’s taken to drinking too much and talking with ghosts since his sister’s murder. Produced by the American Theater Company, American Dead was all about aftermaths. Neveu’s latest work is a kind of spiritual prequel to that spare, strong piece. Premiering at the Goodman in a heartbreaking production directed by Dexter Bullard, Gas for Less lets us see the events that create a Lewie, the moments that make a normal life untenable for certain fragile people....

Noon | Old Town School of Folk Music | $10, $9 members 1 PM | Claudia Cassidy Theater Kenge Kenge This Kenyan ensemble, which began its life as the backing group for a state-sponsored choir and became Kenge Kenge in the early 90s, has a fascinating but peculiar take on benga music, the guitar-driven dance style that arose in the mid-20th century and has dominated Kenyan pop since the 60s. Benga evolved in part from the traditional music of the Luo, one of the country’s largest ethnic groups, and Kenge Kenge purposely undo some of that evolution, using ancient Luo instruments instead of rock-style drum kits and electric guitars—on the group’s 2007 debut album, Introducing Kenge Kenge (Introducing), electric bass is the sole concession to modern music technology in a lineup that includes orutu (fiddle), asili (flute), oporo (horn), and nyangile (gong) as well as a heap of traditional percussion....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The IQA wants “to establish quiz as a mind sport,” elevating it to the level of chess or bridge and adding yet another competition to the “Is it a game or sport?” debate (see also billiards and poker). I don’t have much to contribute to that debate, but here is a concise discussion of chess that seems applicable to quiz....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sometimes you want to go where everybody tells you to eat their pussy; sometimes you just want to watch that place on television. Or at least that’s the case for TruTV, which has decided to create a reality show for Lincoln Park institution the Wiener’s Circle, as reported Monday by the Huffington Post. In case you don’t know what the big deal is about Wiener’s Circle, well, join the club, because I’m not really sure what the big deal is either....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As part of its ongoing weekend matinee series on serial killers, Music Box is screening Richard Fleischer’s true-crime hit The Boston Strangler (1968), with the late Tony Curtis, in one of his best performances, playing Albert DeSalvo, who confessed to the murders of 13 women in the Boston area. My long review focuses mostly on these two men, but we shouldn’t forget Fleischer, who earlier had made the masterful film noir The Narrow Margin (1952)....

A couple weeks back Sun-Times reporters Tim Novak and Chris Fusco detailed in a two-part series how many of the “affordable” housing units in the University Village development near UIC were actually sold to connected and well-off people who turned them over for a quick, handsome profit. The stories noted that the development, built on the grave of the historic Maxwell Street community, was raised with the help of millions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies pulled out of tax increment financing accounts....

A tender scene from The Black Godfather Friday marked the start of a great movie-going weekend in Chicago, one that’s filled with such regal offerings as Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion and Mia Hansen-Love’s Goodbye First Love. Crashing the highbrow party is the 1974 blaxploitation actioner The Black Godfather (Sat 6/30, 7 and 9:15 PM, Univ. of Chicago Doc Films), which, along with films like The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973) and Trick Baby (1972), does wonders to dispel the notion that the genre was all cheap thrills and big ‘fros....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In my preview of Danzig’s performance tonight at Riot Fest, I mentioned a few of the silly things Glenn Danzig has done over the past decade or so that have severely tarnished his evil, badass image. More importantly, I also mention how much ass Danzig used to kick. While putting the preview together, I dove headfirst back into the first handful of Danzig albums—it had been years since I listened to them all the way through—and they have stood the test of time incredibly well....