Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Monday night you can catch reggae veteran Beres Hammond at the Shrine or, if it’s more your style, Porn and Chicken at Evil Olive, where they celebrate their third birthday. Sam Wagster and Ben Boye headline this month’s installment of Glad Cloud, a night of ambient music at the Whistler. On Wednesday, you can see long-overlooked UK pop auteur Nick Garrie at the Empty Bottle and the heavy shoegaze of Whirr at Quenchers....

A bright red can of Pringles becomes magical in Bich Minh Nguyen’s graceful new memoir, Stealing Buddha’s Dinner (Viking/Penguin), about growing up in a refugee family in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Like everything else American, the chips are exotic to young Nguyen and her sister. “The Pringles glowed by window light, their fine curvatures nearly translucent,” she writes. “So delicate, breaking into salty shards on our tongues.” If only they can chomp enough American food, they might become as normal as their blond Dutch Reformed neighbors and schoolmates....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Welcome a newcomer to the lexicon: butt chugging. Butt chugging also takes a more prosaic label, the “alcohol enema,” but the former was the nom du jour at a Tuesday press conference conducted by a lawyer involved in the nation’s foremost butt-chugging case—he used the phrase on account of the gravitas it lent the proceedings, I imagine. Butt chugging refers to the rectal consumption of alcohol (pretty NSFW illustration here, via Buzzfeed, of course), and is not a supergreat idea, even if you really love getting drunk....

As conceived by I.O. music director Dave Asher, Club Kettle Drum is a nightclub seamlessly blending music and improvisation, though quirky improv ensemble Happy Manniversary, joined by two solid veterans, never sing, and the musicians play straight songs from a real album, Sci Fi Sol. But each group supposedly inspires the other’s choices. Sometimes the show feels like a concert with distracting improv interludes, sometimes like an evening of comedy rudely interrupted by music....

In August 2007, the Chronicle of Higher Education created a stir by reporting that the appointment of Sean Buffington to the top job at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts had boosted the number of openly gay university presidents in the United States to three. The others cited were Ralph Hexter of Hampshire College and Roosevelt University’s Charles Middleton, who said a “Plexiglas ceiling” had been keeping gays out of academia’s top administrative job....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A friend summed up the prognosis for this latest celebrity-chef venture in Chicago on Twitter: “Can’t-miss celebrity chefs from the east coast open restaurants in Chicago just to prove to themselves that yes, they can indeed fail.” And indeed, for a cautionary tale Morimoto can simply look out Japonais’s front door at the empty husk of BLT American Brasserie, a fabulously expensive eatery from New York chef Laurent Tourondel that got some of the most scathing reviews in recent Chicago history and closed in six months....

Someday genetic engineering will create the perfect jazz bassist; until then, Larry Gray will have to do. As a soloist he blows most of his peers away: originally a guitarist, he has a strong tone but a feathery technique, which allows him to construct statements that would sound natural coming from a tenor sax or trumpet. His arco work is especially remarkable–Gray got a master’s in classical cello after he’d already made his name as a top-flight jazzman....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Andrea Gronvall on the new release from Disney’s Touchstone Pictures: “Terra-cotta gnomes, the sort that decorate people’s lawns, are the characters of this bizarre feature animation, which lampoons the British obsession with gardening and upholds a long tradition of cartoons pitched to tots and stoners. On two adjoining backyards, armies of brightly painted figurines wage a relentless turf war; after a young blue gnome of the Montague household (given voice by James McAvoy) falls for the red princess of the next-door Capulet cottage (Emily Blunt), there’s some mild sexual innuendo and numerous obstacles to romance, not to mention a slew of puns, inside jokes, and tunes by Elton John....

Not that you could ever get sick of gelato, but take a break—there’s a world of other ethnic ice creams and ices out there to sample. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Reader‘s pick for best ice cream in its Best of Chicago issue this year, Village Creamery (8000 Waukegan , Niles, 847-965-9805) not only churns out rich ice cream in dozens of Filipino and American flavors—even durian from the notoriously smelly fruit—it also makes fruit sorbets and shaved ice....

It’s just a little more than a week before the Jai-Alai Savant’s record-release party–which was at Darkroom on Thursday, April 5–when I meet up with guitarist and front man Ralph Darden. The first thing he asks me is if I know any trumpet players–he wants to add a horn to the band’s lineup for the show. This is typical Ralph: he comes up with ideas almost nonstop, and though he can barely focus long enough to follow through on any of them, he’s got the hustle to pull things together at the last minute....

thursday12 Thursday12 The 1900s, Brighton MADevoGirlsPeter Bjorn and John, El Perro Del Mar Friday13 DevoGirls Saturday14 Don ByronEarthen GraveKingdomShrinebuilder Sunday15 Reigning Sound Monday16 Devendra Banhart Berlin Philharmonic Wednesday18 Brother Ali DEVO It’s robotic and jerky and stuffed with artsy spiel about “de-evolution,” but to my ears Devo‘s 1978 debut album, Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! (Warner Brothers), remains one of the greatest rock records ever made. Mark Mothersbaugh worked hard to be the antithesis of the cool front man, and between his bizarre vocals—simultaneously detached and hyperactive—and the catchy, off-kilter riffs, the songs struck just the right nerve, becoming subversive classics in spite of their conceptual freight....

The Straight Dope response by Cecil Adams regarding autism and vaccines [June 8] is filled with false statements that reflect a basic ignorance of the truth and moreover, the product of a journalist who failed to investigate both sides of the story. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » First, thimerosal is such a poor preservative that the FDA banned its use in 1982 from over-the-counter medications because of toxicity (including deaths) and product contamination....

With our gender roles up for grabs, we would-be moderns are naturally fascinated by historical figures who had to negotiate—and, often enough, trade away—their sexual identities. The female historical figures in particular. Cleopatra is one, as indicated by the fuss Stacy Schiff provoked last year with her biography of the legendary Egyptian. England’s Queen Elizabeth I is very definitely another. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Henry VIII’s youngest daughter has become a trope, ironically, for becoming a trope....

The films of Italian writer-director-actor Nanni Moretti (Caro Diario, The Son’s Room) mete out their narrative developments so casually that they often appear formless; only in hindsight do they reveal a profound understanding of the rhythms of everyday life. This religious satire, in which a newly elected pope (Michel Piccoli) begins to gets cold feet about taking office, plays as a gentle comedy, complete with obvious (though very funny) gags about cardinals playing volleyball and the like....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Going further than you might have thought permissible, she treats audience members with venomous contempt. Within the first five minutes of her routine Lampanelli had mocked: gays (“faggots”), white gays, white people, privileged white people, black people, black people who act like white people, black gays, Hispanics, Mexicans, Koreans, Asians, “Chincs,” people with glasses, short people, and busty women....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As part of Select Media Festival 8, which highlights experimental and contemporary art and media, the “Oral Asstravaganza” will take place at the Co-Prosperity Sphere (3219 S. Morgan) on Saturday from 8 to 11 PM. Billed by its organizers as “the most important reading since Charlton Heston uttered the words carved onto those stone tablets that he retrieved from the misty mountains where the clouds spoke to him in the years that pre-dated knowledge,” this free event features readings by Kokie Whirlwind Arcuri, Lulu Callier, Mike McBeardo, Davide Tortuga, and I Feral Wolfhound Gleason....

There are two types of people in this world: those who will descend the long black steps below 111 W. Kinzie and feel as if they’ve stepped into the Cotton Club, and those who, upon making that descent, will slowly realize to their dismay that they’ve stepped into a bottomless pit. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Despite Untitled’s silly pretensions toward secrecy—there’s no sign advertising its awkward name except for the one touting valet service—I felt I could like this cavernous “speakeasy” with its imposing black doors, multiple dining rooms and bars, curtained booths, back patio, “secret” entrance, “whiskey library,” and performance spaces hosting jazz and burlesque acts....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » D’Angelo first made a splash in the early 90s with Human Feel, a quartet with guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkle, reedist Chris Speed, and drummer Jim Black that pushed postbop into thrillingly aggressive, harmonically ambiguous spaces. Though D’Angelo has proved his jazz bona fides with his fluent, hard-swinging work in the Matt Wilson Quartet, elsewhere he’s consistently demonstrated nonchalant flexibility and disdain for tidy categories, blurring the lines between edgy postbop and noise rock–especially in Morthana, his collaboration with the Norwegian group Moha....

The dunes rise higher than 100 feet above the wide beach at Jean Klock Park, the only public lakefront park in Benton Harbor, Michigan. In some places they’re almost pure white, glaring and brilliant in the sun, and in others they’re exploding with native trees, grasses, and wildflowers. From the crests you can see miles of beach to the south, more rolling dunes and bluffs to the north, downtown Benton Harbor to the east, and of course the countless shades of blue in Lake Michigan to the west....

The lineup for the ninth annual Chicago Sketch Comedy Festival features lots of local players in key positions. Chicago mainstays and up-and-comers earned prime slots for the event, scheduled to bring more than 100 ensembles to Theatre Building Chicago over the next two weekends. Executive director Brian Posen says that’s just how things shook out: deserving groups get the gig, and this is the home teams’ year to shine. Best of Chicago voting is live now....