The fourth installment of the Umbrella Music Festival is one day shorter than the third. But otherwise this event, which is eclipsed only by the Chicago Jazz Festival as the most impressive and adventurous jazz event of the year, seems to have escaped the effects of global recession. It kicks off November 5 with “European Jazz Meets Chicago,” a fest-within-a-fest wherein half a dozen European consulates will introduce native talent to the local audience....

The rock felt chalky. Stein was holding it in his hand, yeah, an irregular light gray lump, but he could feel it on his teeth and in his nostrils. Little granules of something that made his face feel dry and cracked. He wanted to brush his teeth. Or better yet, just drink some water. But that’s an excuse, he thought. He had to go through with it. Nick the Prick wasn’t answering his phone calls....

Shakespeare once referred to April as “proud-pied.” This Wolf doesn’t know what that fucking means, but it seems like spring is the time for new vinyl pies from White Mystery, the local sibling garage-rock duo of Alex and Francis White. After all, it was last March that their self-titled, self-released debut LP sprang into the world like flowers from the ground or some other Shakespearean shit. Well, it’s happening again! Following a spate of tour dates in the south and midwest this spring, the flame-haired group will drop their second album, Blood & Venom, on April 20....

Mandela “set a moral example for the world,” the New York Times editorial board proclaimed. The best way to honor him is to follow that example. In Chicago, that should mean committing to end our own apartheid. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The word “apartheid” is from Afrikaans, and means a state of living apart. The poverty rates in most of the black neighborhoods mentioned above are five and ten times the poverty rates on the northwest side—in Edison Park, Norwood Park, Jefferson Park, Forest Glen, and Dunning, where the percentage of black residents is, respectively, ....

No Worse Than the Backwater Times It’s déjà vu all over again. Michael, the News Star newspaper never “went out of business” as you stated in the Nov. 18th edition of the Reader. It is alive and kicking and delivered for free each and every Wednesday. In fact it has never missed a single deadline in its 106-year history. I recall you apologizing to me in print back in March after making the very same statement in these pages....

Within minutes of entering Pete Klockau and Katie Monachos’s home, I’m lounging among six-foot totems with a mai tai in hand; a Jukebox Jam comp is playing, and I’m almost convinced I’m in an island tiki bar instead of on a quaint street in Uptown. My hosts, both artists (Katie is an architectural designer, Pete’s a freelance illustrator and sales manager at Bloodshot Records), are lovers of midcentury modern artifacts, especially anything tiki....

So if black dudes who are into indie rock are called “blipsters” — and I’ll just reiterate Peter’s “ugh” on this one — does that mean that Jay-Z and Kanye are “blemo” for liking Fall Out Boy? (And is someone going to come up with a good term for white pop-punk/emo dudes who somehow think they’re gangsta? “Wanksta” has already been taken.) I know Kanye likes Maroon 5, so he’ll probably like the new Fall Out Boy, which sounds exactly like Maroon 5 for reasons I have little hope of ever understanding....

“You can push emotional extremes,” declares assumption 24 of José Rivera’s essay “36 Assumptions About Writing Plays.” “Be sexy. Be violent. Be irrational. Be sloppy. Be frightening. Be loud. Be stupid. Be colorful.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Rivera has acknowledged that the script was inspired by his own parents—Puerto Ricans who moved to the mainland in 1959, when Rivera was four. The first act, set on the island in the early 50s, charts how the heroine, Flora, meets husband-to-be Eusebio....

The Good Negro Goodman Theatre | Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South Viaduct Theater Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The action starts with the violent arrest of young mother Claudette (Nambi E. Kelley), who’s taken her four-year-old daughter into the whites-only restroom of a department store because the one for colored women was out of order. A trio of black activists—charismatic, media-savvy Reverend James Lawrence (Billy Eugene Jones); his coarse, showy second-in-command, Henry (Teagle F....

Like most jazz drummers, San Francisco’s Scott Amendola is usually thought of as a sideman, and over the last decade and a half he’s filled that role well for T.J. Kirk, the Charlie Hunter Quartet, and the Nels Cline Singers, among many others. But his albums with the Scott Amendola Band make it clear that he’s also an exceptional composer and arranger. The most recent, Believe (Cryptogramophone, 2005), is the best, featuring a stellar cast that interprets his material with remarkable sensitivity and imagination....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » • The nomination process for the Jean Banchet Awards, the top local restaurant and chef awards, is now open through Monday. Go here to see the past winners and make your nominations. • After the Chef Ball, two of the visiting chefs, Jason French from Ned Ludd in Portland and pastry chef Kyle McKinney from Barley Swine in Austin will join West Town’s Two for a guest-chef dinner on Sunday night....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It was good that way too. In fact, my friend and I were so impressed with the hefeweizen that we went back for seconds before we left—and at a beer festival with hundreds of options, that’s saying something (it was the only beer we tasted twice). I can’t find my notes from this summer, but what I remember about the beer is how well-balanced it was....

You’re liable to enjoy Christopher at first. The 60-year-old patriarch of an urban British family that includes three grown children and Beth, the solicitous mum, he’s an academic of some kind who likes to think of himself as an honest bastard. A let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may sort. Archie Bunker with an advanced degree. Even at the dinner table, in the bosom of his nuclear unit, he’s arrogantly literary, aggressively argumentative, proudly bigoted, and supremely potty-mouthed....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The new bike fix-it station outside the Paramount Room has been in place for several weeks now, but it’s easy to miss. I bike past it every day on the way to and from work, and I’ve never noticed it. So last night the restaurant/lounge, in collaboration with the Active Transportation Alliance, officially launched the new resource for cyclists with a ribbon-cutting ceremony....

*A first-rate profile of an artist in a serious magazine like the New Yorker will tell you plenty about his life and loves, and you may finish the piece delighted to have made his acquaintance. However, it might occur to you later that you understand what this important thinker is thinking no better more than you did before. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jon Baskin, Jonny Thakkar, and Etay Zwick are students in the Committee on Social Thought, an interdisciplinary doctoral program at the University of Chicago....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » First, Nduja Artisans is a new project from the family that owns Harlem Avenue’s Ristorante Agostino. Tony Fiasche’s 84-year-old grandparents still make it back in the old country, but now Fiasche (who used to cook for private events at Publican Quality Meats) and his father, Agostino, are producing it in a USDA-licensed factory in near-west-suburban Franklin Park. They’re grinding it with back fat, trim, and picnic shoulder and using imported Calabrian chiles, and they hang the artificially cased chubs for about three weeks to cure, which gives their nduja a nice tanginess (they’re also working on a natural casing variant that ages for ten to 12 weeks)....

Come across a terrific news story these days and you’re all but certain to find somewhere to publish it—that is, if you stretch publishing to include posting it on a website few people have heard of and fewer read. That’s what Michael Volpe had to do with a story he thought would rock Chicago—a story about convicted city employees continuing to draw salaries. He’d hoped for better. A couple of equally obscure sites lifted his story without asking permission or significantly enhancing its visibility....

For most of the summer and into the fall, Chris Lawrence and Chris Persons were both busy planning campaigns to unseat alderman Mary Ann Smith in the 48th Ward, which includes Edgewater and parts of Uptown. Each man thought he was the best candidate to make the run; the one thing they agreed on was that Smith, a four-term incumbent, was ripe for defeat. “Let the best man win,” said Persons....

The night after I first heard Wars (Polyvinyl), the latest from Bay Area combo XBXRX, I had a dream in which one of the band’s members whispered to me that their name means “sebics sericks.” I was struck dumb by the righteous meaning of this: it made absolute sense then, and of course absolutely none afterward. Which is a reasonable metaphor for Wars itself, a topsy-turvy car crash of an album (12 songs in 28 minutes) full of swerves that seem only moments later to be in clear defiance of noise-rock physics....

This festival is an opportunity to see professional theater artists enthusiastically perform and stage three one-acts by high school students. The four young winners of Pegasus Players’ 21st annual contest demonstrate a good ear for dialogue and a talent for comedy. However, the plot’s familiar in Enoch Abraham’s Karma, about a student poet trying to be a player while ignoring the female friend who really cares. And the tone is uneven in Scarlett Mays’s In Your Dreams, which offers a slapstick take on teen girls trying to sneak into a concert plus a message about HIV and the power of family....