Tal Rosenberg, Reader digital content editor, is obsessed with. . . Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Gwen Guthrie, Padlock Gwen Guthrie is a really good singer, but what’s most impressive about this mini album is that it’s the best music I’ve yet heard from the Compass Point All Stars, who are right up there with the Funk Brothers and the Muscle Shoals crew as one of the premier groups of session musicians....

Saxophonist Jon Irabagon, who grew up in Morton Grove and later Gurnee and studied music at DePaul University, has steadily made a name for himself since relocating to New York in 2001 to pursue further studies at the Manhattan School of Music. For the plast few years he’s earned plaudits for his work in the gonzo freebop quartet Mostly Other People Do the Killing, and last year he made an impressive debut as a leader with his band Outright!...

Bad Examples Daley promised taxpayers parking garage revenues and a private foundation would cover much of the ongoing costs of park operation and maintanence. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In reality, Daley sold off the underground garage lease for immediate cash, in part to cover construction bonds. In 2008, the city admitted Millennium Park conservancy fund never happened, and the park was costing an extra 8....

RHYMEFEST Rhymefest’s new mix tape, Man in the Mirror, is a much more interesting treatment of MJ’s work. These are freestanding tracks, not remixes, each built around a loop from a Jackson or Jackson 5 song, and little of the source material is instantly recognizable to a casual fan. Though it samples the King of Pop as though he were a mere mortal, Man in the Mirror is worshipful in its own way—in the skits Rhymefest talks with a Michael Jackson impersonator (about the way other races see black people, about the pressure he feels to put thug shit in his rhymes), and he sounds so sincere that it doesn’t feel tacky....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Move on doesn’t mean abandon. Which is why, when I read Mark Brown’s tribute to John Conroy in the Wednesday Sun-Times, I didn’t think twice about this passage: “His editor suggested he move on to the next subject, and he tried. After all, he told himself, he wasn’t having much impact. But he kept coming back.” That’s not true....

Remarkably, this weekend brings the release of two smart, well-acted dramas that look long and hard at a subject much ignored: how prison can become a tool of government policy. Steve McQueen’s Hunger, which won the Golden Camera (for best first feature) at Cannes and the Gold Hugo at the Chicago International Film Festival, chronicles the last six weeks of IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands, who starved himself to death in Northern Ireland’s Maze Prison in 1981 to protest his lack of status as a political prisoner....

One afternoon in late March I was tooling around the west side with my pals Rob Lopata and Peter Engler. I’ve written about Engler’s exploration of the underexposed culinary culture of the south and west sides before. This time we were out looking for soul food restaurants that have so far escaped the unrelenting glare of our rapacious local food media. But the day’s eureka moment came when Peter spotted an abandoned hand-lettered red-and-yellow sign near Chicago and Laramie advertising mississippi hot tamales from the delta....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Who said comedy wasn’t a sport? For the fourth consecutive year pH Productions exploits the hype of the NFL Super Bowl with its own contest, pHrenzy Bowl, in which improvisers are eliminated round by round based on “arbitrary rules and audience votes.” Aside from a referee and color commentator, this year pH has brought in a legitimate sideline reporter in Mike Hall, who talks sports for the Big Ten Network and Fox Sports....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Joe Henry writes his metaphor-rich songs like a man mesmerized by language, and he applies his honeyed, precise voice to his lyrics with obvious pleasure. But his meticulously detailed records also rely on gorgeous arrangements shaped by the distinctive contributions of top-notch musicians, including the sculptural grooves of drummer Jay Bellerose and the elegant rootsiness of pianist Keefus Ciancia,” writes Peter Margasak in Soundboard....

There’s probably no form of music more soulless than the mash-up, that chimera created for the most part by Internet-savvy kids with cheap sound-editing programs. Sure, the synergy of a mix can sometimes outshine the source material–50 Cent meeting Nine Inch Nails, Missy Elliott fronting Joy Division—but most mash-ups are musical one-liners, exercises in irony good for a quick laugh but rarely a second listen. The form just came into its own in the early 2000s, but Gawker’s music blog Idolator (among others) has already declared it dead....

QMy brother is 22 years old and mentally ill with social anxiety on the scale of agoraphobia (officially diagnosed). He’s made significant progress in the past few years, but he’s stuck on the fact that he’s a virgin and is convinced that he’s not going to make any real social progress until that’s no longer a fact. His particular problem makes it impossible to reason with him—he’s a little Asperger’s-y—and he is convinced that he will only be able to pursue a job, have a social life, and tackle other obstacles after he loses his virginity....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » New York tenor saxophonist Stephen Gauci kicks off a long weekend in Chicago with a promising quartet gig tonight at Elastic with bassist Ingebrigt Haaker Flaten, reedist Dave Rempis, and drummer Tim Daisy. Haaker Flaten appears on Gauci’s newest album, Nididhyasana (Clean Feed), an all-improvised session billed to his quartet Basso Continuo, which is named after a form of accompaniment used in Baroque music....

thursday31 Thursday31 Julian Lage Group Skull Defekts Friday1 Ben Allison Band Lil Wayne Kurt Vile & the Violators Yan Jun, Li Jianhong, and Wang Fan Saturday2 Ben Allison Band Death and the Powers Off! Sunday3 Blue Cranes, Dave Bryant Monday4 Dave Bryant Tuesday5 Adventure Wednesday6 Acid Mothers Temple & the Melting Paraiso UFO Death and the Powers Tamaryn BEN ALLISON BAND Bassist, composer, and bandleader Ben Allison has recorded nine albums of original music, and with each one he finds a new focus; among other things, he’s hybridized jazz and Malian music with kora player Mamadou Diabate, played modern chamber jazz with his group Medicine Wheel, and experimented with rock concision....

It’s widely believed that when one spouse dies the other tends to die sooner than he/she would otherwise. While this is plausible, I have a hunch it’s one of those beliefs–like the disproportionate number of babies supposedly born nine months after a blackout, or toilet flushing during Super Bowl halftime emptying a city’s water supply–that’s nifty but untrue. So tell me, if (say) a 70-year-old man dies, is his wife likely to die sooner than she would if the old guy lived?...

A first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Don’t be fooled by a person’s beliefs about what dying might be like for them. Because people are not always the best predictors of their own path when the rubber hits the road. Whether this person is from a faith background or not, or whether this person has a loving family and this person is doing it solo—those kinds of things just don’t seem to be a great predictor....

According to the official history on its website, Austin’s South by Southwest music festival launched in 1987 “to reach out to the rest of the world, and bring them here to do business.” For most of the quarter century since, that’s remained the fest’s primary purpose: When I first attended in the late 90s, as an industry hopeful with a wristband I’d bought myself, SXSW was still the place where pretty much every unsigned band worth knowing and every music-biz rep with a contract to offer swarmed together in a bacchanal of deal making....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For my contribution the Reader‘s daily 12 O’Clock Track last week, I posted a biting version of “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” by the great Bahamian guitarist Joseph Spence, noting that I don’t possess the same knee-jerk, absolutist aversion to holiday music as many of my colleagues. In fact, I sometimes really enjoy it, a clear vestige of warm childhood memories....

Claire Pepper Emiliana Torrini Yesterday the superb Icelandic singer-songwriter Emiliana Torrini released the first single from her forthcoming album, Tookah (due from Rough Trade on September 10). It’s her first record since 2008, when she released the gorgeous Me and Armini, an effort dominated by gentle acoustic guitars. I was taken aback when I first heard today’s 12 O’Clock Track because it reminded me of 80s dance-pop, replete with the old-school synthesizer tones, but then again, Torrini’s first internationally released album from 1999, Love in the Time of Science, had a strong electronic shimmer as well....

From Phil Karlson’s Gunman’s Walk In this week’s issue, Drew Hunt writes at length about the 1958 western Gunman’s Walk and its director, the underrated B-movie maverick (and Chicago native) Phil Karlson. Hunt explores the themes of antiracism and antiviolence in Karlson’s 50s films, arguing that the filmmaker should be considered, pace Andrew Sarris, a subject for further research. Gunman’s Walk screens on Monday at 7:30 PM at the Portage theater; it’s just one of many great revivals in town this week....

3270 N. Clark Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After five years of running their own Web development and marketing agency, dWebz, Jason Uzarraga says he and his wife, Jessica, felt it was time to expand their business. “We wanted to take all these things that we love–toys, sneakers, design–and combine them in a way that was really complementary.” So back in October, along with business partner Brian Nevado, they started knocking around ideas for a boutique catering to toy collectors and sneakerheads....