The fifth annual Riot Fest is the most ambitious yet, with six venues hosting 16 shows—punk, ska, pop-punk, hardcore, and plain old rock ‘n’ roll—between Wednesday, October 7, and Sunday, October 11. The festival typically includes a handful of reunited bands, as well as a few classic acts that don’t play out too often (usually due to a case of old bones); this year those categories include the Butthole Surfers, Cock Sparrer, the Dead Milkmen, 88 Fingers Louie, Youth Brigade, Naked Raygun, 7 Seconds, Screeching Weasel, the Teen Idols, and the Murder City Devils....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Brendan Scanlon, aka the street artist SOLVE–whom you may remember from his Blue Line TV installation–was stabbed to death yesterday early Saturday; he was 24. Kirk Tobolski, also 24, was charged with his murder. There’s a Flickr discussion thread where people are paying their respects. Here’s a video interview with him (he and/or the cameraman was understandably coy about showing his face); he appeared in Shylo Bisnett’s roundup of prominent local street artists in Gapers Block....

The Fader Fort at South by Southwest was a confusing maze of chill-out rooms and swag tables, outfitted with a Levi’s boutique and a guitar tech. Outside was a stage and enough room for a few hundred hipster types to stand around drinking SoCo punch and Bud. It was one of those flossy party spots that represent the most New York-ified aspects of the SXSW experience–the place was crawling with industry types, thick with attitude, and so ostentatiously exclusive it had its own hierarchy of badges and wristbands, separate from the festival’s system....

A couple weeks ago a message popped up on my Twitter account from someone who’d heard my name dropped during a talk at Harvard on black youth culture and Web 2.0. The speaker was Wayne Marshall, a writer, DJ, ethnomusicologist, and probably the only person on staff at Brandeis University who’s been written up by the Fader. Turns out we share an addiction to YouTube footwork videos and DJ Nate, and a blog post I wrote about the bedroom-production juke wunderkind landed me in Marshall’s presentation....

During his years as a touring puppeteer, Ralph Kipniss had some uncanny run-ins with strangers. Like the time in the winter of 1963 when he was driving from Chicago along the Pennsylvania Turnpike to meet his William Morris agent in New York City. He was supposed to arrive that afternoon but was delayed by weather. “It was snowing like you wouldn’t believe,” he recalls. “I said, ‘God, I hope we get there....

Journalism used to be prix fixe. You paid one price for your morning paper and everything came with it: news, sports, stock tables, and comic strips. Culture, scandal, and punditry. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Literature is another form of news,” she tells me, “and with fewer and fewer newspapers, books are taking up the cause of educating people and enlightening them.” In her view, Printers Row has two big jobs to do....

A vending machine/jukebox from another planet dominates Walk-In, Fernando Melo’s new ensemble work for Luna Negra Dance Theater. It looks and sounds surreal. But then everything in the piece, including the set’s floor-to-ceiling psychedelic wallpaper, is a bit off. Aiming to explore the mental states behind daily routines, Melo says he started with the simple, mundane movements of everyday life, but made them different—very different in some cases. Among the many creepy overlaps between the human and the mechanical in Walk-In: soda cans rolling across the floor, echoing the whirling solo that opens the piece, and dancers manipulating one another as if they were inanimate objects....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I was cleaning out the cupboards, looking for canned goods and perishables to donate to a young woman’s bat mitzvah project, and had to wonder if I was seeing symptoms of some sort of unnamed eating disorder. Dusty, unlabeled spice jars of dubious provenance; enough dried chili peppers to power a car engine; an avalanche of dried legumes, tea bags, and half-empty boxes of pasta tumbling down from the third shelf....

WHPK’s annual Pictures & Sounds festival is taking place on Saturday at the University of Chicago’s Film Studies Center. The program, which gathers electronic sound artists to perform live scores to films of their choosing, boasts an impressive lineup this year: it’s headlined by John Wiese, an LA-based electronic noisemaker who frequently collaborates and tours with post-industrial noise monsters Wolf Eyes and ambient-doom duo SunnO))). The rest of the lineup is rounded out by Milwaukee’s Peter J Woods and local experimental mainstays Bil Vermette and Jason Soliday....

Since December 17 we’ve been counting down our genre favorites for 2012, leading up to our Year in Review issue. Now it’s time for the year’s worst films, and may God have mercy on their souls. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Avengers The Avengers In his capsule review for Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, Jonathan Rosenbaum began by saying, “Not bad for a toy commercial,” a pithy but no less apt assertion regarding a film driven by marketing dollars and brand recognition....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Earlier in the year I wrote about the Ungnomes, probably the best high school band in the world. The members of the rude-as-hell punk-rock four-piece, which includes Jon Langford’s son Jimmy on lead vocals, weren’t even of driving age when they released their genius debut collection of recordings, Grape Drink, one year ago, and they’re back now, one year older and one year wiser, with a new set of tracks....

Before this week, you couldn’t listen to the self-titled first record from local heavy-prog outfit Ga’an unless you had a boom box or a Walkman or an ’89 Celica at your disposal. The band released it in summer 2009 on cassette, and then Records on Ribs reissued it in the UK—also on cassette. But on Tuesday it finally came out on vinyl, thanks to Captcha Records. It’ll be available locally at Reckless and Permanent....

Physically awkward and socially graceless, with a voice only a Canada goose could love, Julia Child was the last person on earth about whom anyone would’ve thought to say, Oh, that one—she’s going to bring the subtle, sophisticated pleasures of French cuisine to the American table. Yet that’s what Child and her two French coauthors did, in 1961, with the publication of Mastering the Art of French Cooking—the book that also, arguably, triggered the whole foodie revolution....

Spin Theater Wit Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In Spin, playwright Penny Penniston makes an especially mystifying attempt to put her audience on the defensive. The gesture comes across as cheap, childish, and unnecessary—a superficial and simplistic bid for depth and complexity. Worst of all, it undermines Jeremy Wechsler’s sharp Theater Wit production—the first in Wit’s new, three-theater complex—and obscures the fact that the rest of Penniston’s play is actually pretty good....

You already know what these locals sound like, whether you realize it or not. As dedicated conservators of shoegaze rock, they’ve internalized the genre’s defining tropes: the quaking, washed-out guitars; the blisscent vocals; the six-and-a-half-minute songs. Formed in Bloomington in 1997 by guitarist and singer Jeremy Wrenn, in 2003 and 2004 the band released a series of four EPs, collectively called Winks & Kisses, on Clairecords, home to many young shoegaze devotees....

In some ways, the 15 nonfiction pieces in Aleksandar Hemon’s The Book of My Lives resemble the short stories in the author’s 2009 collection Love and Obstacles: the two books share settings—Sarajevo, in the former Yugoslavia, and Chicago—and explore geographic and cultural dislocation. But where you had to tease the autobiographical elements out of the former volume, the essays here, some of which first appeared in the New Yorker, save you the trouble....

Formed in 2001 by Melbourne vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Dan Whitford, Cut Copy brought a mellow, melodic vibe to the underground club scene—a welcome relief from the jittery, angular electroclash that had been dominant for a few years but was in decline by the 2004 release of the group’s debut, Bright Like Neon Love. Since then Whitford and his band have been refining a sound that blends contemporary electro with 80s new wave and 70s art-rock, a combination that’s won them a large international fan base (whose rapid growth has been fed by the ongoing EDM explosion) and helped them become bona fide chart-topping pop stars in Australia....

On this program of seven mostly outstanding works by local filmmakers, Adele Friedman’s Marietta (2006), showing two men (and one of their mothers) in an elegant apartment, is one of her best. Her wide-angle lens and camera movements spread out the decor and figures before us, polymorphously embracing every detail with obsessive intensity. Chi-jang Yin’s Glass House (2005) uses various techniques to bring the architecture to life; for example, shadowy see-through figures underscore the way light undercuts the solidity of the interior it fills....

You could see there was something out of whack right from the start. For his debut production as artistic director of Remy Bumppo Theatre, Timothy Douglas had chosen Mourning Becomes Electra, one of the vast and earnest dramas Eugene O’Neill wrote as he struggled to create an American equivalent of classical tragedy. And the Remy members in the cast looked lost. These folks have great chops, but they built their theater on playwrights like Stoppard, Albee, and Shaw, who can carry off a serious intention with a light, contemporary touch....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At the end of it we talked about her book, Taste Memories—”my only book,” she says, containing every recipe she treasures from her years in business (yes, including her unbelievably light Heavenly Hots pancakes). She published it herself, and she’s doing a brisk business at the only three places you can buy it—her restaurant, online, and at Women and Children First in Andersonville (where she’ll appear Friday night)....