Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’m no expert when it comes to comics, but I have always liked the work of Ben Katchor , particularly his old strip Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer . Seven years ago he made news by becoming the first cartoonist to land a MacArthur Fellowship. A year earlier he had embarked on another first—a comic book opera. Composers David Lang , Michael Gordon , and Julia Wolfe —all key members of the Bang on a Can collective in New York—had been invited by Turin, Italy’s Settembre Musica Festival to create an opera, and they approached Katchor about collaborating....

The Reader’s Choice: Relax on Milwaukee Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Relax straddles the divide between gentrifying Logan Square and blue-collar Avondale: crotchety old regulars camp out in the back of the huge bar by the dart board and pool table while kids from the Rat Patrol bicycle gang hang out in front, drinking dollar beers and eating popcorn from a greasy machine embellished with a picture of Rick James....

So the spring equinox found me digging not so much on the sun but on Earth. As I’ve written before, this is one of my favorite bands because at times I have both a long attention span and the metabolic drive of a 20-foot python that’s just eaten a pony. Hibernaculum (Southern Lord) hardly even counts as a new release—three classic tracks redone in the band’s current sparse, plodding style, along with “A Plague of Angels”, previously only available on a tour-only split 12-inch with Sunn0)))—but that doesn’t matter....

The Chick Magnets (Angie Carr and Meredith Melville) provide an accurate, funny portrayal of lesbian life in Chicagoland in this 50-minute sketch comedy show. Adeptly transforming themselves into a host of different characters with quick, convincing physical and vocal shifts, they also have detailed interactions with imagined objects. The evening’s best running gag–observations on “lesbians through time”–deserves to be expanded. But other bits, like a dull sketch about CTA pigeons considering decamping to the Metra, drag on too long....

The 16th Chicago Underground Film Festival runs Thursday, September 10, through Thursday, September 17, 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 » American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein A harsh critic and prominent target of the Israel lobby, Norman G....

The plug got pulled on two major openings today. The Shedd Aquarium announced that the premiere of its much anticipated “multi-media, multi-species aquatic show,” Fantasea, has been postponed “until later this summer.” Apparently the aquatic performers aren’t quite ready for their close-ups. No new date has been set. And the Goodman Theatre announced that its production of Joan D’Arc, directed by Aida Karic and scheduled to open next September, has been dumped....

My favorite record of the year I recently picked up Amanda Petrusich’s fascinating book on 78 RPM record collectors, Do Not Sell at Any Price, and, early on, paused on a passage about Facebook. After collector and preservationist Christopher King mentions Facebook postings as the kind of bits of everyday life that can easily vanish in the future, Petrusich posits the possibility that these digital scraps could last longer than we might imagine when we type them out: “Although King would have scoffed at the notion it’s possible to argue that our digital legacies (all those dopey Facebook posts) will ultimately prove infinitely more enduring than our material legacies....

The line between Dan Whitney and his hick alter ego, Larry the Cable Guy, is frustratingly fuzzy. Like Andrew Dice Clay, Larry spouts obnoxious jokes (on a “retarded” girlfriend: “I’d say tomatuh, she’d say bowling chairs”), and like Minnie Pearl, he’s hyperbolic in his southern dress and dialect. Whitney, however, is far from poor, doesn’t have an accent, and spent his first 16 years in Nebraska–though he did go to a Baptist college in Georgia and seems to share Larry’s right-wing leanings....

The Pinnick Fund Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Several years ago (approx. 1995), I drove to Iowa to visit a client. While going over an overpass on I-80, I must have hit what they call black ice. My car, with back-wheel drive, started to fishtail out of control, and I ended up doing a complete 360 and came to rest facing traffic from the opposite direction....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On his first new album in eight years, New Orleans Meets Harlem Vol. 1 (J-Master), Roberts is joined by bassist Roland Guerin and drummer Jason Marsalis for a program that includes some Jelly Roll Morton gems from the earliest days of Crescent City jazz, a couple Scott Joplin rags, Duke Ellington’s “Black & Tan Fantasy,” a few Fats Waller classics, two Thelonious Monk pieces, and a single original....

These locals attracted a lot of attention with their full-length debut, 2005’s Out of a Center Which Is Neither Dead nor Alive, released on the little At a Loss label, and even before the CD presses had cooled off they were snapped up by Relapse Records. On the new follow-up, The Ritual Fires of Abandonment, producer Sanford Parker, who joined the band as a bassist during the Center sessions, is clearly settling in, and though Minsk subtly enrich their complex sound, they stick to the same diabolically simple formula they used to create it: a combination of doom metal with spacefaring psychedelia and a bit of rusty old-school darkwave....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » They went on to release five more full-lengths, but the most recent was in 2002. They haven’t played Chicago in six and a half years, and at the time they considered that show part of their farewell tour. Since then they’ve reunited maybe twice a year, when the mood strikes or the money’s right–in 2007 they were flown to Tromso, Norway, about an hour from the Arctic Circle, for a festival that also included the Stooges and Turbonegro....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This formulaic horror movie serves mainly to illustrate what a resourceful actor Ethan Hawke has become; as a washed-up true-crime author desperate for a hit, he plays on his boyish energy to suggest a darting intelligence beneath the character’s vanity and opportunism. The writer discovers a supernatural entity while investigating a series of unsolved murders, and in a twist that’s likely to please celluloid buffs, the creepiest evidence comes from eight-millimeter film reels he must splice together himself....

Situated on a primo piece of real estate on the ground floor of the new Park View Hotel, facing the Green City Market, Perennial is for the most part a solid homecoming for chef de cuisine Ryan Poli (formerly of Butter), who’s working under the aegis of executive chef Giuseppe Tentori (Boka). There’s a rustic and seasonal simplicity that’s occasionally sideswiped by some untamed flourishes: a sweet peekytoe crab salad was all but destroyed by a bitterly acid avocado mousse that’s in the running for one of the worst things I’ve eaten all year, and the short-rib cannelloni that accompanied some otherwise beautiful seared sea scallops was a textural nightmare of overmanipulated manky meatstuff....

Philip Sherburne, a contributor for years to the likes of the Wire, XLR8R, and Pitchfork, is widely regarded as a leading trendspotter and tastemaker in the arena of forward-thinking electronic dance music. Since expatriating to Spain five years ago, he’s shifted more toward advancing the cause in practice, DJing and producing the kind of minimal techno and microhouse (a term he coined) that his name’s so often associated with. A set from July 2006 at the Barcelona club Raum, posted on his blog (philipsherburne....

Most of us don’t have to grapple with whether we’ll ever eat our pets. Govanni McCall doesn’t have that luxury. “I would like to one day get to the point where I could eat my own, but if I raise them as pets, I don’t think I could do that,” she says, referring to the four chickens she’s raising in her backyard in Bucktown. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

During his years as a grad student in biochemistry at the University of Chicago, Josiah Zayner spent a lot of time thinking about proteins. But they still remained somewhat abstract. “A protein is very tiny and small,” he says. “You can’t touch it or feel it or interact with it. I began thinking that if you could interface biology with electronics, you might be able to interact with proteins.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In this week’s long review I look at two fine political dramas: Steve McQueen’s debut film, Hunger, about the 1981 prison hunger strike of IRA member Bobby Sands, and Tim Disney’s American Violet, about a poor single mother in Texas who’s wrongly charged in a drug sweep and sues the powerful DA for civil rights violations. And you can’t go wrong with Sugar, the new baseball drama by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck (Half Nelson), also opening today....

It seems to us that saying others are experiencing “sour grapes” moments [The Business, March 16] should be reserved for people who actually review packets, and are in the room when decisions are made. Certain gallerists with integrity, Catherine Edelman, Ken Saunders, Tom McCormick, or Thomas Masters, for example, who actually know what’s what in the city and in the CADA, and have other dealers’ interests at heart besides their own, would have been more appropriately placed on the jury....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Patio Theater, just two miles away, happened to have 35-millimeter projectors. But owner Demitri Kouvalis had announced just a few days earlier that he was shutting down his theater too, at least for the summer, because his air-conditioning system had broken down. But the whole situation turned out to be more screwball comedy than film noir. Owing to the cool weather, the society was able to finish its summer series at the Patio, and the Patio will be back in business with its own programming next month....