Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In more book news, here’s the Salon take on the other shit-stirring food book du jour, Barry Glassner’s The Gospel of Food. Unfortunately I don’t have much to add because . . . well, I’m embarassed to say it’s been sitting on my kitchen table under stacks of unread New Yorkers and the cable bill for several weeks. But since three people, including my mom, have sent me the link, I’ve moved it to the top of the pile....

The New York Times ran a nice piece on Cubs über utility player Mark DeRosa the other day. Turns out that not only can the guy play second and third base and right and left field while batting .285 with 87 RBIs–three of them in the Cubs’ win over the Mets last night, which he left in the fifth with a calf strain. He also went to the Wharton Business School and was a starting quarterback at Ivy League Penn....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Because Journalism 101 now holds that no one reads the sports pages in the morning who doesn’t already know the details of the games the night before, exceptions to that general principle come in for some exciting reading. I read on. Wilson overcame a dismal offensive performance by hooking up with Tate for an 80-year scoring strike late in the third quarter as the Seahawks (7-1) prevailed despite mustering only 135 yards of offense....

Click to embiggen. Two of the most ubiquitous and indispensable characters in Chicago metal started a label this spring, but you can be forgiven if you haven’t heard about it yet—it’s only got two releases, both from groups that as far as I know haven’t played in Chicago since the records came out. War Crime Recordings is the project of engineer Sanford Parker (who’s also played in Buried at Sea, Minsk, and Nachtmystium, among others) and Yakuza/Bloodiest front man Bruce Lamont....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Wednesdays are typically the day that my colleague Peter Margasak contributes a 12 O’Clock Track, and in his honor I’m going to post a number that I think he might like: the title cut off deceased saxophonist (and Chicagoan) Eddie Harris‘s 1968 album Silver Cycles. To get a sense of what a lot of Silver Cycles sounds like, all you have to do is note that one track is called “1974 Blues”—even though the album was released six years before the year in that title....

I saw “The Middle” at the beginning, when it looked different than it will at the end. The clever conceit of this show, curated by Jessica Cochran of Columbia College’s Center for Book and Paper Arts, is that its content will transition, over a three-week period, from work by one artist to work by another. As of this writing the space belongs to the beguiling domestic scenes of Amanda Greive. One painting, Anatomy of Despair, shows a woman leaning against a shower stall wall, her body obscured by glass blocks....

The program for Court Theatre’s Iphigenia in Aulis features a chart tracing the house of Atreus through five generations, from Zeus on down to his three miserable great-great-great-grandchildren. And theres’s a handy little biographical comment under each name. The blurb on Tantalus, for instance, notes that he cut up his own child Pelops, cooked him, and served him to the gods. Not to be outdone, Pelops’s boy Atreus made an entree of his two nephews and presented it to their father, Thyestes, for dinner....

Dirty Looks Photography Dumpster Babies It’s starting to be that time of the year when bands hit the road, and if you wanted to, you could see more than one great show a night. This weekend proves just that, with three days stacked with tons of awesome shows. Japanese post-metal/psych/doom/rock-‘n’-roll trio Boris plays two shows at Lincoln Hall; Friday’s show is opened by Young Widows and is sold out, but Saturday’s show with Pallbearer is still for sale....

Rhian Askins Clinic Record Store Day and the Chicago International Music & Movies Festival have come and gone, and the Chicago Bulls were bounced hard in the first game of the playoffs. Nothing to do but dust ourselves off and get back into the groove. On Monday you can step into the way-back machine and catch Traffic cofounder Dave Mason at Space in Evanston, or check in with hip-hop trailblazer KRS-One and former Black Uhuru singer Mykal Rose at the Shrine....

The 17th Chicago Underground Film Festival runs Thursday, June 24, through Thursday, July 1, at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, 312-846-2800. Tickets are $10, $7 for students, and $5 for Film Center members. Following are selected programs; for a full schedule see siskelfilmcenter.org. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Life Is Unpredictable: Films by Jonas Mekas Seven short works from the guiding light of the American avant-garde....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Already a great record shop and mail-order service, Dusty Groove in Wicker Park recently expanded its business even further, becoming something of a record label. In the last couple of months it’s released five out-of-print albums on CD, all of them licensed from Universal Music. If any retailer is in a position to start a label, it’s Dusty Groove....

Framed as something of an ode to the city’s fabled improv comedy scene (from which SNL just plucked three more performers, Tim Robinson, Aidy Bryant, and Cecily Strong), the Four-star Comedy Fest makes its debut Saturday at the east end of Navy Pier, with an afternoon of workshops, an evening of performances, and a live podcast taping for good measure. Organized by Chicago School of Comedy cofounders Ben Capraro and Jimmy Carrane, the festival offers 12 free—I repeat, free—workshops (50 minutes each, 1-4 PM) led by teachers from well-known institutions like Annoyance Theatre, ComedySportz, and iO....

Maybe because the Giordano company grew out of a school, it seems to have more than its share of dances about dancing. Christopher L. Huggins’s new Pyrokinesis is neatly divided between rehearsal and performance. In the first half, accompanied by languid Satie-esque music, the dancers are initially isolated, looking inward: they lazily push away from each other or collapse together, and everything’s a little soft. But by the time the section ends, the process of coalescing into a community is well under way....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Grandma J’s is so old-school that—much like my grandma—it doesn’t even have a Facebook page, let alone a website. Inside it’s a cozy jumble of mismatched wood furniture and tchotchkes, with bird stencils on the wall and a candy dish on an end table. It’s easy enough to believe that you’ve stumbled into someone’s grandma’s house (not my grandma’s, though—the decor isn’t to her taste at all)....

OTHELLO WRITERS’ THEATRE INFO 847-242-6000 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Weird how little Othello’s blackness really matters. That other Venetian, Shylock, absolutely must be Jewish or The Merchant of Venice just plain falls apart. But as large as Othello’s skin color looms in our perception of him, it doesn’t actually do much. Sure, Desdemona’s father, Brabantio, goes into a racist rant when he finds out that Othello’s secretly married his baby....

This double bill features feisty, politically fed-up comedians best known for their TV and film work (both can be heard in Disney’s forthcoming animated adventure Ratatouille). After making more than 40 movies, Janeane Garofalo still gives off the vibe she did in 1996’s The Truth About Cats & Dogs, relying heavily on hard sarcasm and unflagging pessimism. Unlike most stand-ups, the unpretentious Garofalo eschews jokes for amusing anecdotes and observations and emphasizes personality over shtick....

[Pure Fiction home] I root through the heap of blankets, find my checkered boxer shorts, and slip them on. The waistband stops where my gigantic gut hovers over the elastic like a suspended pink avalanche. I then climb into the tattered red union suit I’ve recently pulled out of a garbage bag of old clothes and button it up. I situate myself in the space next to her and soon we look like the sort of proper couple that would own this gloriously expensive condo in Streeterville....

It was 3 AM, an early-summer night turning into an early-summer morning. Ben Steger was bicycling home to Edgewater from a party in Pilsen when he got the text from his friend Chris Batte: K.C. Haywood, captain of the Fighting Cocks kickball team, was in a coma. Haywood, a Kansas native, was working as a firefighter in Taos, New Mexico, when he met Hart in 2004. His “speed country” band Handsome Molly had played a bar where she worked....

Though most of Sean Grennan and Leah Okimoto’s musical about the marital trajectory from naivete through cynicism to tender rediscovery is taken from the recycle bin, occasionally it surprises with a zippy line or inventive scene. And the ensemble rises above even the most tired material, especially Gene Weygandt and Kathy Santen as the weary midlife couple, extracting laughs from cliched parental dynamics and (God save us) Viagra jokes. As newlyweds, Kelly Sullivan and David Larsen transcend wide-eyed stupor to find moments of genuine poignancy (particularly in a song about the loneliness of business travel)....

Cuban pianist Omar Sosa enjoys a well-deserved reputation for following his own path. Where most of his compatriots attack every chorus with the urgent intensity of a dying man, he incorporates space and light into his virtuosic playing, which links him both to older Cuban forms and to the mysteries of postmodern jazz. And his ongoing interest in uniting musical traditions of Africa and the Middle East using Afro-Cuban rhythms as the glue has produced some seriously idiosyncratic stuff–2002’s Sentir is a wild ride featuring a Moroccan singer and an American rapper....