Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A free-spirited young Iranian woman begins to explore a secret sexual relationship with her best friend, while her older brother finds new power inside their liberal, middle-class family by aligning himself with the thuggish morality police of the Islamic Revolution. Despite his own carefully concealed drug abuse, the brother takes it upon himself to install hidden security cameras inside the family’s home so he can monitor everyone’s activities, and his arranged marriage to his sister’s friend sets the two siblings on a collision course....

I’ve been collecting records since middle school. I started playing records in small venues around 2006. Soul music is really interesting as far as the DJ scene goes; it’s pretty divided. One of our goals was to bring together different types of DJs as well as some relevant contemporary acts. We wanted to run the gamut, from northern soul to funky breaks to Motown, and do something different than a typical 60s soul-club kind of party....

Q My boyfriend of 16 months and I have a great relationship. He loves my blow jobs, but he will not kiss me if I have his come in my mouth. It grosses him out. We have talked about this, and he won’t even try. I have no problem if he kisses me after going down on me. I just want him to try. Is there something wrong with asking him to taste himself?...

Harpoon has got to have the best T-shirt of any band in the city right now. It’s black, with a high-contrast white baby seal on the front under the band name, spelled out in Old English lettering. It works on two levels: it uses a traditional metal/crust design template to subvert the form by crossing it with something out of Cute Overload, but also the juxtaposition of that cute, defenseless seal pup and that sinister-looking word suggest a scene of immense violence waiting to happen just offscreen....

BRUTE NEIGHBORS More than 50 local writers contributed work on the theme of urban nature for this anthology, edited by poet Chris Green and DePaul University environmental science prof Liam Heneghan. Of the dozens of poems included, a mere two—Stuart Dybek’s “Ravenswood” and “Beggar Girl” by Billy Lombardo—mention pigeons. C’mon, poets! You’re giving short shrift to the archetypal urban bird. David A. Ansell Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In 1978, David Ansell and four fellow med-school grads loaded a U-Haul with their belongings and drove from Syracuse, New York, to Chicago—more specifically, to Cook County Hospital....

See our reviews and live coverage of the bands playing on: Friday · Saturday ·Sunday Afterparties Pitchfork main » Leor GalilReader staff writer 4 PM Slip away from El-P’s set to see Waxahatchee shrink the Blue Stage with the piercingly intimate songs off Cerulean Salt. 12:45 PM Grab dozens of bottled waters and store them in a secret fridge that I plan on burying deep underground. Tal RosenbergReader digital content editor 6:15 PM Try to stomach the last pork taco or pulled-pork sandwich I plan on eating for a long, long time....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ted had received an e-mail from a reader, Bob Belke, who astutely complained, “I can’t take it anymore. These guys make Santo sound informative. All Farmer offers is where every major-league player went to high school, or what he did 20 years ago.” That about nails it, as the transcript from the top of the third in a June 20 game against the Florida Marlins shows:...

Chekhov’s dramas are tragedies to those who regret love’s frequently perverse timing and unrequitedness and comedies to others who find emotional paralysis, squandered talent, and psychic inertia cause for ridicule, not regret. Michael Menendian’s staging of Jean-Claude van Itallie’s adaptation of The Sea Gull, about two generations of artists misunderstanding one another, is determinedly tragicomic, honoring equally Chekhov’s accurate diagnoses of human frailty and grasp of humorously wrongheaded good intentions. A true Chekhovian ensemble, the dreamers and dupers here deserve one another....

Rachel Niffenegger, artist who’s part of a group exhibit at the Hyde Park Art Center, gets weird with: The Mental Illness Happy Hour Flipping through the TV channels in the early aughts, I would sometimes land on Dinner and a Movie on TBS. If you aren’t familiar, hosts Paul Gilmartin and Annabelle Gurwitch would announce a film to be aired in full and take intermittent breaks to cook a related recipe, such as Creepy Crawly Crab Legs during Arachnophobia....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » My profile on Vienna Beef veep Bob Schwartz a few weeks back prompted a representative of a local law firm to point out that the venerable hot dog concern has just settled a class-action lawsuit accusing it of falsely advertising its natural-casing hot dogs as “100% beef” or “pure beef.” Seems that a handful of hot dog eaters who keep kosher (or maybe not–the complaint isn’t explicitly clear) discovered that Vienna uses sheep casings and sometimes hog casings on some of its sausages....

The last couple of weekends, we collected our little pencils and little notebooks and put on our little glasses and backpacks and set forth to the Chicago Humanities Festival, where this year’s theme was “Animal: What Makes Us Human,” in hopes of bettering ourselves through education. Here are some things we learned. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Race in America has to be learned—not just by native-born children, but by adult immigrants, too....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I don’t really know where I got the itch to fast for Yom Kippur this year. Forgoing food and drink from sundown to sundown was always optional for me growing up since my family is about as far from practicing Judaism as Woody Allen’s exes. I’ve fasted a handful of times, mostly when I was in high school in New York, where public school students have the Jewish high holy days off....

Art inspired by the great Christian duality should be as grand as possible, or what’s a heaven (and hell) for? And so the biggest pieces in “Heaven + Hell”—a show that sprawls across two galleries, the Loyola University Museum of Art and Intuit—are a couple of 9-by-12-foot paintings by William Thomas Thompson, depicting the titular concepts. On display at LUMA along with other on-high artifacts, Thompson’s Heaven features so much white paint and so many radiating lines that you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s lit from behind....

The last thing dancer-choreographer Adam Rose wants is for you to enjoy his work. He aims to inspire fear and dread. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Rose, 28, speaks haltingly but articulately; a self-described shy young man, he’s transformed onstage. About half the time he performs as a woman. Pretty much all the time his movements are contorted, transfiguring his face into a mask of rage or grief and his limbs into agents of violence, sometimes directed at himself or, more rarely, someone else....

Watching “Produce” is like peering into a teeming arts test tube. This in-the-round showcase, termed a “gateway drug” to experimental dance and music by Art Intercepts producer Lauren Warnecke, is an eyeful. Each of the eight groups participating this year, the program’s third, offers a glimpse of its work; then emcees Warnecke and Anthony Ingram step in to mix, match, and make up the rules as they go. Hosting must be like orchestrating a huge, unruly dinner party: when I went, there were about 45 people in the room, pretty evenly divided between artists and audience....

Most diners wouldn’t think to drive west down Lake Street in search of good grub. Not so far beyond the Loop the street enters what used to be one of the most vibrant manufacturing areas in the country—but now serves as a tough reminder of the rust belt’s economic fortunes over the last several decades: vacant lots, shuttered factories and storefronts, and windowless convenience stores lie in the shadows of the roaring Green Line....

Courtesy of Nick Astro’s Facebook page With Pitchfork Music Festival on the horizon I’ve been spending large chunks of time listening to a smattering of acts on the bill to get properly prepared; I’ve been breaking up those listening sessions with Teeflii and DJ Mustard’s Fireworks, Ty Dolla Sign’s Beach House 2, and whatever select tracks I fall for while scrolling through Twitter and my RSS feed. (I haven’t gotten into Jay-Z’s Magna Carta Holy Grail past some cursory listens that left me fairly underwhelmed—sorry, folks....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Show: Gaida “Gaida Hinnawi’s first album, Levantine Indulgence, captures a sensibility that radiates expansively outward from the Fairuz and Umm Kalthoum songs she learned as a child,” writes Peter Margasak. “She’s rooted in classical Arabic and folk sounds as well as vintage Lebanese pop, but working with jazz musicians—in particular trumpeter Amir ElSaffar, a longtime collaborator who was very involved in the making of the record—broadened her vocabulary further, resulting in some surprisingly breezy hybrids....

AP Photo/The News-Gazette, John Dixon Erika Harold announces her plans to challenge Rep. Rodney Davis in the 2014 Republican primary. My parents were Republicans. My uncles and aunts were Republicans. They were white. They weren’t stupid. I fault the Tribune‘s Friday editorial “Good Riddance” on one point only. “If the Illinois GOP doesn’t recognize the self-inflicted damage caused by partisans who disparage anyone who doesn’t look or act like a traditional Republican,” said the Tribune, “well, party officials won’t have to scratch their heads as to why they keep losing elections....

After a decade and a half of putting up with being a countercultural punchline, industrial music’s found itself unexpectedly back in fashion in 2013, thanks not only to the legions of Tumblr users exploring and reviving a quintessentially 90s brand of goth-industrial identity but because of its obvious influence on what could very easily go down as the most influential album of the year. As a longtime fan of people howling over combative drum machines and short-circuiting electronic noise, I heartily applaud this turn of events....