Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Former Chicago actor Michael Stahl-David has so far been known for more or less serious roles. The youngest person ever to study at The School at Steppenwolf, he appeared here in the About Face Theatre productions of Theater District and One Arm, and the 2003 Chicago premiere of Edward Albee’s The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? at the Goodman (he played the gay son of a couple whose marriage is threatened when the husband has an affair with a goat)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This weekend the Music Box opens the first Chicago engagement of Marina Zenovich’s documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, which looks at the notorious 1977 statutory rape case against the highly regarded film director. It’s a fascinating movie in many ways, exploring the media’s sick fascination with Polanski (whose parents died in the Holocaust and whose pregnant wife, actress Sharon Tate, was slaughtered by the Manson Family in August 1969) and reconstructing the judicial skullduggery that prompted Polanski to flee the U....

Beet, Sara Holwerda You wouldn’t expect to walk into a show about sex and be most affected by a beet. Amid all the representations of pouty lips and perky breasts, there’s no reason that a root vegetable should speak so strongly to sexual identity. And conversely, in any other context—say, hanging in the kitchen of your mom’s sassy friend (probably near an oversized bottle of chardonnay and a sign reading “Dull women keep immaculate homes”)—the beet likely wouldn’t earn a second glance....

The Sea and Cake INFO 773-276-3600 or 866-468-3401 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The sound of the opening track, “Up on Crutches,” isn’t much different from what I think of as basic Sea and Cake: genteel and gently funky, with front man Sam Prekop singing breathily about something I can’t quite sort out. The differences in texture are subtle–fewer obvious overdubs, less studio fussiness, more reliance on the band’s customary stage instrumentation (guitars, bass, and drums, as opposed to synths or programmed percussion)....

I’m not a big fan of beheading videos, either, but if Jones really believes that watching one on the Internet “amounts to complicity in a terrorist act” [“The Media and Modern Warfare” by J.R. Jones, June 22], I think he would be an excellent advocate for the Patriot Act’s mission and would be well-qualified as a mouthpiece for the Bush administration’s exploitation of terrorism. Indignation is fine, and watching grisly snuff films is an odd pastime, to say the least, but equating the activity with terrorism is a cavalier, irresponsible, and potentially dangerous statement....

METAL | Miles Raymer Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I agree. You can bang your head to a lot of the stuff on Fools—largely due to the rhythm section—but Hoffmann and guitarist Nate Perry indulge their love of tunefulness and dual guitar leads in a way that makes Bible of the Devil’s previous albums seem bashful. There’s a lot of Thin Lizzy in the hooks and even more in the dual leads, and on “Anytime” Hoffmann’s attempt to sound like Phil Lynott crosses an odd line so that he actually sounds like Craig Finn of the Hold Steady, a band that approaches the platonic ideal of rock qua rock....

Having hosted the Green Music Fest just two weeks ago, West Town hops right back in the saddle with West Fest, held along Chicago between Damen and Wood on Sat 7/10 and Sun 7/11 from noon till 10 PM each day. The main stage at Chicago and Damen, programmed by the Empty Bottle, has a strong lineup both days: headliner first, the set order is Jonathan Toubin, Fucked Up, Class Actress, Bloodiest, Beach Fossils, and Yawn on Saturday and We Were Promised Jetpacks, Small Black, the Life and Times, Dominique Young Unique, Light Pollution, and Caroline Smith & the Goodnight Sleeps on Sunday....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At last month’s Green City Market Chef’s BBQ, Friend of the Food Chain and allium enthusiast Alan Lake and I were sitting around talking garlic scapes, the subject being unavoidable, as abundant piles of them were being used as table centerpieces. Scapes are the pliant, coiling green flower stalks typically cut off from the subterranean garlic bulb; usually they’re some of the first things to show up at spring farmers’ markets....

At first it seemed like just another senseless shooting in an already violent summer. A little after 4 AM on Monday, August 18, 2008, two men were fired on as they sat in a Mercedes outside the Rock ‘n’ Roll McDonald’s. By the time police arrived four minutes later, the Mercedes was on its way to Stroger Hospital. The 29-year-old driver had been shot five times; the passenger, his younger brother, was declared dead on arrival at Stroger....

Mike Sula Chicharron de queso, El Metro Did you know there’s a breed of magic pig in Mexico that’s made out of cheese? When you fry the skin you get cheese cracklings or, as they say in Español, “chicharrones de queso.” I’ve never seen such a thing north of the border, but at El Metro, the bright, modern West Town taqueria from the sisters behind Gaudi Cafe, they have one on the menu....

I considered many candidates for this award, including the comprehensive Bangs & Works compilations from 2010 and 2011, DJ Nate’s disjunctive, minimalist 2010 album Da Track Genious (all three, like Da Mind of Traxman, released by the excellent Planet Mu imprint), and DJ Rashad’s sample-clashing Just a Taste: Vol. 1 (on Ghettophile). What distinguishes Da Mind of Traxman is its cohesion. The samples and beats always complement one another—for instance, on “Itz Crack” a Ronnie Laws sample (the same one in Black Moon’s “Who Got da Props“) is combined with hyper­active, pitter-pattering drumbeats to sound like a jacuzzi....

When the Blackhawks moved from the Chicago Stadium to the United Center in 1994, they found the cost of breaking down and reinstalling the mighty old Barton pipe organ prohibitive (at least by the standards of “Dollar” Bill Wirtz, God rest his puck-pinching soul). So they installed a new Allen organ designed to have the same reedy sound, and to provide continuity they kept organist Frank Pellico to run it. More than two decades into his tenure with the Hawks, Pellico continues to stick to the glorious standards, some of which he no doubt learned at the knee of his onetime teacher Al Melgard, the stadium’s old Barton master: the opening strains of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor for a penalty, the theme song from The Godfather when an enforcer gets in a fight, “Pretty Woman” for the inevitable high-heeled hottie in the Shoot the Puck contest, and of course the seemingly out-of-place but ever-rousing “Hava Nagila,” which Pellico used to play at Wrigley Field when he was the Cubs’ organist in the early 70s....

CLOVERFIELD Directed by Matt ReevesWritten by Drew GoddardWith Michael Stahl-David, Odette Yustman, T.J. Miller, Lizzy Caplan, Jessica Lucas, and Mike Vogel Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The giant-monster movie is a slightly different breed because of the special effects required to bring the big guys to life. The original King Kong (1933), with its abundant and ambitious use of stop-motion animation, was so expensive that few imitators followed in its wake until the 50s, when Godzilla arrived in the form of an actor lumbering around in a rubber suit....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » To indulge in a lil’ foodie free association, the bit of information that keeps bobbling brightest to me in the seas of prose about the Conrad Black trial is the now-famous dinner Black hosted for his wife at New York’s La Grenouille. The surprise 2000 birthday dinner for 80 is cited in almost every article, along with the Blacks’ two-week trip to Bora Bora, as primo examples of Black’s extravagance and “kleptocratic” mindset....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Show: Big Freedia “For more than two decades now New Orleans has had its own indigenous strain of stripped-down, partycentric hip-hop, loosely analogous to Baltimore club or Miami bass. Bounce, like those styles, is simple, bass-driven, and relentless; it relies heavily on a tiny handful of songs for its samples and breakbeats, and the rapping is usually more call-and-response than narrative,” writes Peter Margasak....

The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther Jeffrey Haas (Lawrence Hill) The Hampton and Clark families and the survivors of the raid are being honored at an event on November 5 at the law school at Northwestern University, where Fred spoke to the students and faculty exactly 40 years ago. It includes a reading, a discussion by a panel of scholars and writers moderated by Bernardine Dohrn, and a public reception....

Courtesy of Charlie Rose Garry Wills British essayist Clive James ruefully observed in Sunday’s New York Times that America’s only serious cultural deficiency is its lack of “hostile literary criticism.” By way of example of what there’s not nearly enough of, he offered his own 1977 review in the New York Review of Books of John Le Carré‘s The Honorable Schoolboy. It was “undoubtedly a hatchet job,” James allowed, though not written to harm Le Carré, merely to have “fun” by picking out the book’s “absurdities and pomposities....

The light board went out opening night, but Sabrina Kramnich as the title character–whose nickname is a contraction of “girl midget”–provided all the incandescence anyone could want, conveying with sensitivity and irresistible charm Gidget’s desire to be one of the guys and win the heart of Moondoggie. Adapted by Terry McCabe and Marissa McKown and directed by McKown, the show is based on the book by Frederick Kohner, which was based on the adventures of his daughter Kathy, the first girl to join the “go-heads” surfing at Malibu in 1956....

KILLER MOON PIT ER PAT Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s always been tough to pin down exactly what it is Pit Er Pat are trying to be. An avant-garde pop group? Purveyors of bizarre ersatz reggae? An art-damaged jam band? Not even “all of the above” seems like an adequate answer. Bassist Rob Doran left the band after 2008’s High Time, and Fay Davis-Jeffers and Butchy Fuego, who now split their time between Chicago and LA, decided to proceed as a duo—instead of recruiting another member, they’ve incorporated a sampler....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s not hard to figure out why: it grossed $45 million worldwide—about 35 times what the other four movies made combined. It’s the third highest-grossing documentary ever made, after Fahrenheit 9/11 and last year’s winner, March of the Penguins. That means more Academy voters have seen it, so the award is pretty much a foregone conclusion. Compare that to Deliver Us From Evil, Amy Berg’s horrifying tale of a pedophile priest who preyed on children throughout the 70s and 80s as the diocese of Stockton, California, shuffled him around from one parish to the other....