Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Show: Corridors New York sound artist Byron Westbrook has worked with Rhys Chatham and Phill Niblock, and like them he explores sound as a physical force. His new self-titled album as Corridors is a document of his live performances, where he plays heavily processed snippets of trumpet, organ, viola, and guitar feedback through four to eight channels simultaneously. “While the CD already suggests an immersive, shifting ambience, hearing those sounds spread around in the intimate Enemy space should greatly heighten their physical effect,” writes Peter Margasak....

It was during the late summer of 1916 that Erwin, Tennessee, entered the annals of folk-fop history. The little Appalachian town already had a minor claim in that regard, having been misnamed (it was supposed to be “Ervin,” with a “v”) due to a clerical error. But the 1916 incident is what put Erwin over the top fop-wise, making it a worthy target of earnest, bad plays like George Brant’s Elephant’s Graveyard....

people Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Lattimore still lives in Chicago, and teaches at Roosevelt University’s Chicago College of Performing Arts, but her singing career has since taken her around the world. It’s been possible to hear her on local stages now and then—she has a gig at least once a year with the Grant Park Symphony, for example. But there’s an exceptional opportunity coming up: when Lyric does Porgy and Bess this fall, with Gordon Hawkins and Morenike Fadayomi alternating with Lester Lynch and Lisa Daltirus in the title roles, Lattimore will be there, too, as Serena, whose husband’s murder sets the plot in motion....

This Paris-based, 35-year-old all-male butoh company has performed in more than 700 cities. Now, in a one-night stand, it’s finally making its Chicago debut. As a so-called second-generation member of Japan’s butoh elite, artistic director Ushio Amagatsu has a reputation for making kinder, gentler work than butoh originators Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno. Yet it’s still plenty challenging. Amagatsu’s 90-minute Hibiki: Resonance From Far Away, the 1998 sextet being performed here, is dun-colored and slow, like Beckett on major downers....

Cute Eats Cute C.B. Murphy (North Star Press) Shortly after New York governor Eliot Spitzer was caught visiting hookers and forced to resign, Northwestern University professor Laura Kipnis went to dinner with someone who expressed an “everybody does it” attitude about prostitution. The comment gave Kipnis the idea for her new book, which explores the whys and hows of scandal. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That required many specimens, and the real drama of the book lies in Akeley’s many safaris....

I don’t think there can be much argument about “what counts as ‘selling out’ these days” . . . it’s the same as it ever was [“In Praise of Selling Out,” by Miles Raymer, June 22]. What’s novel are the arguments from journalists, bands, and blogs these days justifying it, none of which really make any sense. It’s not taboo anymore because more and more indie rock bands license their music to corporations–yeah, but it’s still “selling out....

Special Edition: All Recurring Themes Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Stories where ordinary citizens pretending to be police officers pull over and scold their fellow drivers are a News of the Weird staple, but a March incident in Boca Raton, Florida, took it to another level. A community service officer said he pulled up near a group of three stopped cars to find what he thought were two young men standing alongside: one was in handcuffs; the other, in military fatigues, claimed to be an off-duty sheriff’s deputy making an arrest and asked him to radio for backup....

Argo How can no one have turned this true espionage story into a big-screen thriller already? In 1980 the CIA and the Canadian government conspired to rescue six American diplomats hidden in private homes after the student takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran. Their cover was a movie production unit shooting Iranian locations for a sci-fi epic called “Argo,” the fictitious office for which was assembled in LA by makeup legend John Chambers (the original Planet of the Apes), who had a clandestine career helping the Agency with disguises....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Over the past year, Logan Square late-night bar the Owl has been booking some awesome, high-profile experimental “secret shows” and announcing them via some rather unconventional means. First there was June’s Silver Apples show—word was spread by a handful of plastic apples that were painted metallic silver and passed around from person to person. After that, there was an appearance from Michigan industrial-noise project Wolf Eyes....

This dazzling program, the first devoted to Michigan artist Kyle Canterbury, features two dozen experimental videos, all but one silent, ranging in length from 34 seconds to 11 minutes. Most feature some play between representation and abstraction, with subjects encompassing nature, domestic and public spaces, and politics–A Video depicts George W. Bush’s features decomposing. I don’t feel fully qualified to evaluate Reader critic Fred Camper’s claim that Canterbury has already “done for video something like what [Stan] Brakhage has done for film....

The shuttering of Aldino’s—the interesting if inconsistent Scott Harris-Dean Zanella pan-Italian effort that briefly inhabited 626 S. Racine—is exhibit A in the case against the so-called restaurant renaissance of Little Italy. Sure, there are good things happening at Three Aces and at Harris’s Davanti Enoteca, but the apparent disinterest of a major university community in a truly novel-for-the-neighborhood endeavor was discouraging. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Harris’s comeback, this time with Jimmy Bannos Sr....

The Bagel A big bowl of Mish-Mash Soup—chicken broth with noodles, kreplach, rice, kasha, and a matzo ball—is the object of many a flu-addled diner’s pilgrimage to this much-loved Lakeview deli. Other menu items, while not as overtly therapeutic, have similarly comforting effects. They include an array of hearty sandwiches, daily soups, and hot entrees. Breakfast is served all day. The room has been given a recent face-lift, but retains its Broadway theme....

On the principle that anything is possible, I did a Google search. But there doesn’t seem to be a real-life model for Legacy Letters, the business imagined in Andrew Hinderaker’s play Suicide Incorporated, that helps would-be suicides craft that final statement that says it all. There is a “suicide note generator” on the bad-taste comedy site porkyjerky.com: you type in your name, click on a reason for killing yourself (“inferiority, destiny ....

Earlier this month the Neo-Futurists celebrated the 25th anniversary of their signature theatrical production, Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind. Fifty weeks a year, the ensemble write and rehearse 30 original two-minute plays based on their own lives and observations. Each audience member (whose price of admission is $9 plus the roll of a die) receives a “menu” of play titles. Thirty numbers are hung from a clothesline above the stage, and audience members call out which play they want to see....

The debate over the future of journalism takes place across a philosophical divide. On one side is the crowd that says the news wants to be free. On the other is the crowd that says so do the chickens, but if we free them we run out of eggs. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » So I think consumers will pay in the end, and I think fairly painless ways will be found to take their money....

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is on his way out of office, but if you’re headed to any Iranian inauguration parties rest assured you can find an Ahmadinejad mask at Fantasy Costumes in Portage Park (4065 N. Milwaukee). Because people will always find excuses to buy and rent costumes, even aside from Halloween. (On a recent visit, a Spanish-speaking woman was trying on a nun costume, and I hoped so hard that her reason for doing so would in some way allude to the plot of Sister Act....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Earlier this week I got an e-mail announcing a new record from a band called Laid Back, whose name I had a hard time placing until I opened it up and realized that they’re the Danish guys who released “White Horse” in 1983. It turns out that almost 20 years after “White Horse” they decided to revisit the jam session that gave rise to the song and finish the remaining material—which they’d left undone after their label rejected it as “too ‘different,’” in the band’s words—using modern gear and techniques....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Happy Monday. Was Lollapalooza fun? If you’re still coasting, high as a kite, on the scandalous grind session you had during the Major Lazer set and the subsequent Missed Connection you posted and plan to hear back from very soon, you should ignore today’s 12 O’Clock Track, “I Called the Cops,” from Iowa City’s Slut River. When I wrote about them earlier this year, I commented on the kind of vibes a band called Slut River is usually going to impart....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A very stupid op-ed by David Brooks, published originally in the New York Times, that’s been e-mailed to me by a friend. “Sometimes a big idea fades so imperceptibly from public consciousness you don’t even notice until it has almost disappeared,” Brooks blusters on. “Such is the fate of the belief in natural human goodness. … Today parents don’t seek to liberate their children; they supervise, coach and instruct every element of their lives....

Richard A. Chapman/Sun-Times Media Reporting on the latest layoffs at Sun-Times Media, the Monday Tribune focused on banished bosses such as Paulette Haddix, executive editor of the Post-Tribune, and Phil Arvia, sports editor for the SouthtownStar and Herald-News. In all, a dozen jobs were lost, and here’s a name that didn’t make the Tribune story: Dave Roknic, who’s a Sun-Times copy editor. More to the point, he is, or was, one of three Sun-Times employees on the negotiating committee of the Chicago Newspaper Guild that’s now mired in contract talks with Sun-Times Media that are going nowhere....