Local Latino-pop progsters Allá are at Engine Studios this week, with Lupe Fiasco producer Derrick “Drop” Braxton behind the boards. They’re recording a single to be released through their Web site in early June, in time to promote their July 18 opening slot at Pitchfork, and a bonus track for a Congotronics tribute/remix album from Crammed Discs due later this year. The band also just wrapped a Coach House Sounds session that will be up online before their May 22 headlining show at Schubas....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Like, for instance, the current outbreak of racial concern trolling among right-wing media stars that’s begun to trickle down to its base. This particular meme spiked recently with the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, which the right used largely as an excuse to chastise black America’s inability to live up to the example that Martin Luther King (now retconned to be an arch-conservative) set for them, but its bread and butter is rap music....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Records are leaked online all the time and for all kinds of reasons: to generate buzz before a legit release, to get revenge, or just because a copy got left within arm’s reach of someone who shouldn’t have it. Prometheus’s reasoning is new to me, though. In a lengthy screed accompanying the first two leaked tracks, he (I’m guessing from the language) puts Fest on blast for his poor choice of record label, his tour cancellations, and his lax iPod security, and complains a lot a lot a lot about El Che‘s repeated delays....

It was all downhill from here. The Night of the Iguana was Tennessee Williams’s last hit on Broadway and his last major artistic achievement. It premiered in 1961, at the beginning of a decade that would end with the author’s stay in the psych ward. Beset by flops, grieved by loss (his partner, Frank Merlo, died of lung cancer in 1963), and hounded by his own lifelong demons, Williams would sink into a severe depression, compounded by pills and booze....

At the end of June, underground Connecticut emo band the World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die landed on several Billboard charts with its debut full-length, Whenever, If Ever: number three on the Heatseekers and vinyl charts, eight on the Internet chart, 66 on the rock chart, and 196 on the Billboard 200. The album, which came out on tiny independent label Topshelf, might have done even better had it not leaked a month earlier via torrent site What....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It got lost in the generally poor play of the Bulls in their season-finale loss to the New Jersey Nets Wednesday–which pushed them from the second seed to the fifth seed in the NBA Eastern Conference playoffs and a first-round rematch with the Miami Heat–but there was ample evidence for NBA conspiracy theorists to consider. The NBA has kowtowed to its stars for decades, most recently siding with Tim Duncan against referee Joey Crawford, and it takes care to make sure the marquee players stay alive as long as possible in the playoffs....

Arkady Kats saw it coming. He’d been building and selling big houses on the North Shore for 15 years when, last summer, he decided he’d better get out of real estate. “We kind of had a feeling that the bull market is going to hell,” he says. “Numbers really did not work last year already, so around last summer this is when we decided that we gonna have a Great Depression....

I was flying home from a much-needed trip out of the country—red wine and meat for everyone in Argentina!—when the Chicago City Council finally got around to challenging the mayor on his tax increment financing scam. Around here, that’s a revolt. Here’s how it happened. Yet for all these flaws, the TIF program has one essential quality that makes it too powerful to resist. It gives Mayor Emanuel hundreds of millions of dollars that he’s free to spend pretty much as he likes....

THE STRANGERER THEATER OOBLECK INFO 773-347-1041 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What does Camus’ existential classic–about a French Algerian who finds meaning in his meaningless life when he goes on trial for killing an Arab–have to do with 21st-century American politics? Plenty, in this unpredictable, hilarious, and provocative play by Oobleck member Mickle Maher. Set during the 2004 presidential campaign, The Strangerer takes place in Coral Gables, Florida, where Bush and Senator John Kerry faced off in their first debate....

QI’m a 32-year-old female engaged to a 34-year-old man. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Since then, he has brought up this subject when he’s inebriated. I’ve told him that as long as this fetish remains a fantasy, I won’t make an issue of it. I also told him that when I am sober it makes me fairly uncomfortable and that it exploits the animal involved....

I am a recently married 30-year-old straight guy. My wife is great, and in fact we have a baby on the way. My relationship with my wife is a good one. We married for all the right reasons after a long courtship. My problem lies with my addiction, if you will, to receiving head from a particular male. He performs his work with a level of skill that no one has ever matched....

In his long and distinguished career as an activist and doctor, Quentin Young has fought to integrate the medical staff at Cook County Hospital, treated the wounds of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and infuriated Mayor Rahm Emanuel by thwarting his attempt to waste taxpayer dollars on Wrigley Field. It was the first time we’d met and I wasn’t disappointed. As Nowakowski’s partners—Cat Jarboe and Jeff Bivens—filmed us, Young chatted amiably for over an hour, charming, good-humored, and gracious....

The idea of eating Asian carp to slow its predicted incursion into the Great Lakes has been bandied about with varying degrees of seriousness for a few years now. The carp are a hard sell in the U.S.: they’re unappetizingly ugly, and the peculiarities of their anatomy make it hard to harvest the meat. Still, after Asian carp turned up in the Mississippi and Illinois rivers in the aughts, they began finding their way into ethnic markets around Chicago, and today millions of pounds of the ugly, toothless, filter-feeding leviathans are shipped from Illinois to Europe and Asia....

friday26 cvelcro lewis & his 100 proof band, tijuana hercules You don’t need to nose around in the Fat Possum trough to find jumpy, fierce, dirty blues rock that sounds like somebody put too much turpentine in the barbecue sauce: two of Chicago’s most underrated party bands are combining forces for a 500-copy split 12-inch on Original Sound Recordings and a release party that ought to lift the roof off the joint (which at the Hideout admittedly doesn’t take much)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The meal was not only one of the better ones I had this year, but a completely charming experience, a reflection of the personalities of the two people behind it—Bickelhaupt in the kitchen and Welsh serving. It was probably good for them that they had another year of practice post-Kickstarter, but now their restaurant, 42 Grams, is opening in January at 4662 N....

It was a dark and stormy night when the first public meeting to discuss the possibility of a Chicago performing arts museum convened at the Mercury Theater last week. A torrent of water poured from the thundering sky and lightning bolts—90,000 of them over four hours—strafed the ground like so much machine-gun fire. Besides that, the Cubs had a home game and parking was impossible. Three months later, Christiansen told the Reader‘s Albert Williams that he “got excellent reader ‘great idea’ response by phone and e-mails, but not a word from anyone to say, ‘Let’s do it....

Bassist and composer Jason Ajemian is one of the most mercurial players on the local improvised-music scene, given to taking wild creative leaps without worrying much about whether he can make it to the other side. In part because he’s so hard to pin down, he hasn’t earned the reputation he deserves–despite being a pillar of free-jazz combos like Triage, Mandarin Movie, and Dragons 1976, playing with folk weirdo Josephine Foster in Born Heller, and most recently joining the Chicago Underground Trio....

James Kennedy’s onstage at the Hideout, wearing a pink jumpsuit and a feather-collared, transparent lab coat. His shock of blond hair flops around as he bounces up and down, playing bass in the “glam-psychedelic-new wave” band Brilliant Pebbles. The show is a release party, but not for a CD or a seven-inch: tonight the band is celebrating the publication of Kennedy’s debut novel, a young adult fantasy called The Order of Odd-Fish....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For a time it seemed that there was no stopping the inexorable advance of Empire La Pasadita. For decades, the taco triangle just south of the Division/Ashland intersection was a safe haven for legions of late-night drunks in need of hangover intervention. Frankly, I think the collective esteem people hold for La Pasadita carne asada tacos is heavily tinted by the persuasiveness of alcohol....

As an adjunct professor at Medill back in the early 90s, Susy Schultz and a colleague organized a program they called “Racism and Sexism From Sources—How Do You Handle It?” Schultz was one of five women at the Sun-Times who began meeting for lunch about once a month to talk things over: family issues for one, newsroom assignments for another. “Were they saying ‘Cindy, go cover that’ or was it ‘Joe, go cover that’?...