What a sad piece of contrived conflict and blatant envy featured in your June 1 issue [“A Little Secret About The Secret” by Julia Rickert, June 1]. Who would ask us to believe that the deceit of James Frey’s fabricated personal experiences published as non-fiction can in any way be compared to a missing direct reference among Rhonda Byrne’s broad compilations of life testimonies and experiences that science has only recently begun to vigorously explore—except perhaps someone seething with envy and quite comfortable with ignorance....

Members of Chicago noise-rock squad Coughs, who broke up in 2006, have started half a dozen hot bands in the years since, but Gossip Wolf thinks Forced Into Femininity, led by former Coughs saxophonist Jail Flanagan, is the most challenging—and the most endearing. In March the group released Messiah of Evil on tape label Human Conduct, and it sounds like Klaus Nomi singing opera accompanied by malfunctioning cash registers. It’s awesome!...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One of the most notable names in Chicago heavy metal is Chris Black. He’s a member of Dawnbringer, Superchrist, Aktor, and Pharaoh, and the former bass player in black-metal revolving door Nachtmystium. Since 2009, Black has also been recording and playing shows with High Spirits, essentially a solo act that has evolved into a full-blown live band. This Saturday, High Spirits—who don’t play live very often—will be taking the stage at Reggie’s Rock Club with Manilla Road, Bible of the Devil, Harbinger, and Ancient Dreams....

INDIE | A party for Implodes’ overdue debut “I was really into black metal at the time. A lot of it is atmospheric and almost like shoegaze,” he says. “I wanted it to be kind of like the Jesus and Mary Chain, but almost a metal version of that.” Written on acoustic guitar and then cloaked in distortion, this material became the basis for Implodes. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

[Plus: New Too: Eleven more recent openings, including Epic, Lockdown Bar & Grill, Life on Mars, and more] House-made charcuterie is becoming the chicken breast of new restaurants. But cured meats actually make a lot of sense in a brewpub—just not Revolution’s mushy sausages, pale fatty hams, and cured pork belly inexplicably drizzled with truffle oil, or for that matter the hilarious vegan rye bread they’re served with. On paper a bowl of bacon-fat popcorn sounds like a perfect beer companion, but in practice it’s a top-heavy mass with chunks of bacon and clods of shredded Parmesan—the antithesis of finger food....

Back in 1983, when he was interviewed for the Art Institute’s Chicago Architects Oral History Project, Edo Belli, the most important Chicago architect you’ve probably never heard of, told a charming story about how he became the chosen architect for the Archdiocese of Chicago and wound up designing Uptown’s Cuneo Hospital and scads of other Catholic institutions in the city and beyond. “Cardinal Stritch was a nice, easygoing individual. He ends up looking at me and he said, ‘Edo, if you were sitting here and I was sitting where you’re at, would you do what you’re trying to convince me to do?...

True Detective It’s the opinion of a number of people—professionals and laymen alike—that we’ve entered a second golden age of television. This is simultaneously great and really annoying. As the New York Times’s David Carr explained it back in March, “The vast wasteland of television has been replaced by an excess of excellence that is fundamentally altering my media diet and threatening to consume my waking life in the process....

Marion Ettlinger Rachel Shteir On Monday I posted a commentary on the Bleader that drew an unusual amount of response—most of it favorable. My editor wrote to congratulate me on my fine words. Naturally, this reaction distresses me. As I wrote a few years ago in the Reader: “Dissatisfaction is the columnist’s lot . . . . Praise a columnist and you stir up trouble.” For columnist, you may now also read blogger....

I’ve been married to my husband for two years and have been with him for four. I’m a little dominant, but beyond that nothing too out-there. My husband, on the other hand, is a diaper-loving, transvestite adult baby. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » He says he knows he’s being selfish, but he’s just not interested in regular sex. Then he cries and says he’s a freak and he doesn’t know why I stay with him....

They’re losing bassist Tom Smith to the woolly wilds of SF later this summer, but until then 1900s side project Mazes are gigging up a storm, with shows Friday at the Empty Bottle and Saturday at the The Old Town Arts Festival Old Town School’s Chicago Folk & Roots fest. Despite rumors to the contrary, Smith’s departure doesn’t signal a breakup—the band is planning on keeping it up via long-distance collaboration and “the Internet,” says Jim Kelly at the band’s label, Parasol....

The Narrator, Tight Phantomz INFO 773-227-4433 or 866-468-3401 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Some of the material on All That was incubated by the Narrator’s original lineup, which got together in 2002: guitarists and vocalists Sam Axelrod and Jesse Woghin, bassist James Barron, and drummer Nate Heneghan. (Woghin is also co-owner of the local label Flameshovel, which has put out all the Narrator’s records....

Courtesy of Run For Cover Records Elvis Depressedly South Carolina lo-fi indie outfit Elvis Depressedly is one of a handful of acts who have helped Brooklyn label Orchid Tapes grow into a reliable source of outre bedroom pop. Last month Elvis Depressedly left Orchid Tapes for Run For Cover, the Boston label that’s been a boon to fourth-wave emo, and from the sound of the newish “No More Sad Songs (N....

Linda Hattendorf, a longtime documentary editor, met a homeless, 80-year-old Japanese-American artist a block from her SoHo apartment in early 2001, and after the World Trade Center attacks made living on the street impossible for him, she put him up, helped him find work and housing, and made him the subject of this impressive 2006 feature, her directorial debut. The fascinating narrative covers the artist’s long stretch in a U.S. internment camp during World War II (ironically, he’d fled Japan to escape the rising tide of militarism) and his ensuing tangles with the government, while simultaneously charting his reconciliation with his checkered past....

A Flowering Tree, the latest operatic collaboration from John Adams and Peter Sellars, is based on a South Indian folktale with a Cinderella plot. A teenage girl from a painfully poor family discovers there’s something she can do (don’t tell mom) that will bring in quick cash and attract a prince. As the story goes, this involves turning into a tree. Chicago Opera Theater’s production is big and bustling, with nine dancers, a 24-voice chorus mostly from COT’s Young Artist Program (singing in Spanish), and a 57-piece orchestra....

The CD sampler that guitarist Todd Rittmann (of U.S. Maple, Cheer-Accident, the latest Rhys Chatham gangbang, and a few other things) sent me a few days ago didn’t have a track listing, but it didn’t need one. It’s by his new band, T&A Lounge Presents, and the songs are well familiar: “Dear Mr. Fantasy,” “Life of Illusion,” “Baby,” “Mexican Radio.” As Rittmann puts it, T&A Lounge Presents is “not JUST a cover band....

Scott Kenemore, author of the novel Zombie, Illinois, feels a kinship with: Boobs of the Dead I was really impressed with Boobs of the Dead, a Walking Dead-themed burlesque show running now at the Gorilla Tango Theatre in my neighborhood. It kind of reimagines the zombie virus as a plague that turns unsuspecting Americans into burlesque dancers. (I like the idea of burlesque as something you can “catch” that replaces your regular clothing with feather boas and garter belts, and your regular activities with sexy zombie dance moves....

Mayor Daley’s $500-million-a-year tax increment financing program is like the Creature From the Black Lagoon. From time to time one adversary or another—Cook County commissioner Mike Quigley or Cook County clerk David Orr—emerges to try to shoot it down. But bullets bounce off its hardened skin and it lumbers on, chewing up billions in property taxes. To compensate for the taxes they don’t get from the city’s 161 TIF districts, local taxing bodies—the schools, parks, county, etc—raise their tax rates....

Dear Katie and Cherie: Cherie wrote: “Michael, has it ever occurred to you that maybe the Tribune is feeling its way toward the obvious: that they are no longer the gatekeepers, but organizers of the discussion?” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But the Tribune is going beyond that, holding up its endorsement as an enticement. A newspaper endorsement—vain, paltry attempt at persuasion that it may be—is customarily held to be that newspaper speaking its own piece....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s as personal a confrontation as a prize fight. But boxers may settle matters in minutes; the trial tennis puts these players through lasts three, or four, or five hours. The tennis we saw in the first set of one of these matches seems separated by an eternity from the tennis we’re watching in the fifth. I went back and watched that game again....

By now you’ve probably heard a thing or two about the showdown between Pilsen residents and Chicago Public School officials over the field house on the playground at Whittier elementary school. But there’s a curious and complicated backstory that’s so far gone unreported, involving 25th Ward alderman Danny Solis, congressman Luis Gutierrez, and officials from Cristo Rey Jesuit High School at 1852 W. 22nd Place. Best of Chicago voting is live now....