Frozen Altars One of my absolute favorite local acts is progressive-psych trio Moonrises, featuring Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) on guitar, Libby Ramer on organ, and Ben Baker Billington on drums. This Monday they’ll be celebrating the release of their new LP, Frozen Altars (Captcha Records), with a free show at the Empty Bottle. Frozen Altars sees the band streamlining what they created on last year’s self-titled full length; it’s got a brighter recording, smoother drumming, and a stronger emphasis on vocal and organ melodies than before....

Sue Kwong This winter, the Reader has set a humble goal for itself: to determine the Greatest Chicago Book Ever Written. We chose 16 books that reflected the wide range of books that have come out of Chicago and the wide range of people who live here and assembled them into an NCAA-style bracket. Then we recruited a crack team of writers, editors, booksellers, and scholars as well as a few Reader staffers to judge each bout....

What makes for a destination restaurant? I kept turning this question over in my mind during a good but not great three-hour meal at Sable, the bar and restaurant in the Kimpton Group’s new Hotel Palomar in River North. Chef Heather Terhune has headed two other Kimpton kitchens: she ran the Atwood Cafe, in the Hotel Burnham, for ten years, and before that 312 Chicago, at the Allegro, and if I were a guest at the Palomar I’d be thrilled to find the chic but cozy Sable lurking just off the lobby....

Ribfest returns to Lincoln Square for its 15th year this weekend, bringing a rib-eating contest with some of the nation’s highest-ranked competitive eaters, barbecue from 13 vendors (“best ribs” judges include Reader Key Ingredient columnist Julia Thiel), and two stages of live music. Between them the Bud Light Stage at Lincoln and Irving Park and the Reader Stage (sponsored by your pals here at the Reader) at Lincoln and Berteau host bands from 5 till 10 PM on Fri 6/7 and from noon till 10 PM on Sat 6/8 and Sun 6/9....

Yesterday local rapper Keary Baldwin, aka Kit, dropped his debut mixtape, New Wavey. The 23-year-old says “new wavey” is a sound, specifically his sound. “I wanted to make ‘new wavey’ a whole thing where it’s not rap or R&B,” he says. “I want to make it its own genre.” Baldwin’s style sits somewhere in the gray area between hip-hop and R&B, in part because he spits so nonchalantly that his rapping sounds a little like he’s singing, and when he sings it sounds a little he’s rapping—his slightly raspy vocals come out pretty effortlessly throughout New Wavey, and at times he sounds so comfortable behind the microphone it almost sounds like he’s having a conversation....

Following a detour into heavy drama with The Fighter, David O. Russell returns to his distinctive brand of neurotic screwball comedy, and like his early features Spanking the Monkey (1994) and Flirting With Disaster (1996), this one somersaults giddily from sanity to insanity to sanity again. The hero (Bradley Cooper), having served eight months in a psych ward for assaulting his wife’s lover, wins release to the custody of his grumpy father (Robert De Niro) and solicitous mother (Jacki Weaver of Animal Kingdom)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Among the extended techniques that occupy such an exalted role in the vocabulary of free improvisation, rubbing and scraping may seem humble, but they’re vital all the same. Obviously many instruments are played by rubbing their strings with a bow (what those in the biz call arco), but an infinite number of objects can be rubbed or scraped to produce a surprisingly wide variety of sounds–it’s common, for example, for a drummer to bow his cymbals or rub a moistened finger across a drum head to create evocative whines and moans....

thursday14 Thursday14 Greg DulliFour Tet Friday15 Patty LovelessMassive AttackJeff MillsTarbaby Saturday16 Big FreediaBaseball FuriesJon Mueller and Olivia BlockTristan PerichTarbaby Sunday17 Early ManJazmine Sullivan Monday18 Olof Arnalds, Doug Paisley Tuesday19 Band of Horses FOUR TET Four Tet‘s latest, the remix collection Angel Echoes (Domino), is longer than the record it draws from, nabbing the handful of high points from There Is Love in You and training them under new management. Featuring remixes of “Angel Echoes” by Caribou and Jon Hopkins—as well as previously vinyl-only remixes of “Sing” and “Love Cry” by Joy Orbison, Roska, and others—it sexes up the most idyllic indietronica qua techno of 2010....

Friday17 Ryan Cohan QuintetHappy BirthdayKatatoniaGreg Ward’s Fitted Shards Saturday18 Charlatans UK PostponedRyan Cohan QuintetJustin Townes EarleMale BondingRavenPeter StampfelSuper Wild Horses Sunday19 Chicago Symphony OrchestraRyan Cohan QuartetSuper Wild Horses Monday20 Heavy Times Tuesday21 Suuns Wednesday22 Dead Confederate HAPPY BIRTHDAY King Tuff formed this band because he was too shy to sing his songs of romantic awkwardness alone. He does so in a soaring sort of squawk, as adolescent as his subject matter on Happy Birthday‘s self-titled Sub Pop debut....

Gary Middendorf/Sun-Times Media Pulitzer Prize winning photographer John White (pictured) was one of the 28 photographers laid off by Sun-Times Media yesterday. A place still remains for staff photography at Sun-Times Media. It graces the corridor walls of the company suite at 350 N. Orleans. Those splendid pictures, spanning decades, saw the company’s current photo staff out the door Thursday when the Sun-Times laid off every last one of them....

Over the past decade jazz pianist Uri Caine has established a niche for himself that might seem like a gimmick if inhabited by a less formidable talent. Since 1997’s Primal Light, a unique and beguiling take on the music of Mahler, he’s used compositions by Bach, Schumann, Wagner, and Beethoven as the basis for radical fusions that both honor the original material and reinvent it–sometimes by merely tinkering with the feel of a piece, sometimes by smashing it into fragments that serve as building blocks for improvisations....

Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon in Bug In preparation for director William Friedkin’s forthcoming appearance to promote his new memoir, The Friedkin Connection, Harold Washington Library Center (400 S. State) is screening The Exorcist at 6 PM on Tue 4/9 in the Pritzker Auditorium. Prior to reviewing Killer Joe for the Reader last summer, I wasn’t all that familiar with Friedkin’s work. I knew the basics, of course, but as with many worthwhile filmmakers, his truest virtues were hidden in some of his lesser-known movies....

The main attraction at Humboldt Park’s Rootstock Wine & Beer Bar, not surprisingly, is the intriguing list of small-batch beverages put together by a trio of Webster’s Wine Bar vets. There are a good many interesting selections—including a passel of wines from Greece, Austria, and unusual spots like Slovenia—among the more than 60 bottles and 15 available by the glass. But the tight, well-curated menu of small and midsize plates, cheese, and charcuterie, from consulting chef Mark Steur (Hot Chocolate) and executive chef Remy Ayesh, is no afterthought, peppered with items engineered to trigger Pavlovian gushes of saliva: bar plates include a few sweet and savory duos, including bacon toffee with spiced mixed nuts and skewers of watermelon and salty halloumi cheese, both grilled smoky and accompanied by a dollop of tangy labne....

We just did a live taping of the Savage Lovecast at Seattle’s Neptune Theatre. Audience members submitted more questions—anonymously, on index cards—than we could possibly answer during the Q&A segment of the show. So I’m answering some of the questions we didn’t get to in this week’s column. Here we go: AYes and no. ASome fetish/sex clubs allow people to observe on the theory that today’s nervous newbie observer is tomorrow’s confident active player....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Maybe you think spending the better part of three days outside in the sweltering ass heat, getting drunk and being pounded by heavily amplified music, is exhausting. And that’s fine. But the rest of us know that half the fun of music festivals is pushing your partying abilities to their absolute limits through the fine tradition of the unofficial afterparty, and the post-Pitchfork Music Festival scene is already shaping up to be pretty interesting....

It’s been years since I’ve seen a jazz band blow the roof off a club like Atomic can. They inject harmonically complex, pleasingly melodic postbop with pedal-to-the-metal free-jazz intensity–and they keep getting better with every album. On last year’s Happy New Ears! (Jazzland) the Swedish-Norwegian quintet throttled back a bit, allowing the empathetic interplay between the musicians to take the foreground: bassist (and Chicagoan) Ingebrigt Haaker Flaten and drummer Paal Nilssen-Love might drop bomblike accents among the taut long tones from the front line, or reedist Fredrik Ljungkvist and trumpeter Magnus Broo might crisscross the rippling accompaniment of pianist Haavard Wiik with delicate simultaneous solos....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After years of seeming to be at sea, Benjamin Hanson returns to his childhood home in Wisconsin in 2008 when his parents ask him to ready his deceased uncle’s property for sale. A former burnout and convict, Ben has no money or prospects, and his only marketable skills are his knacks for standardized-test taking and puzzle making. Ben clearly is still devastated by the death of his geologist older cousin Wayne at the family cabin on the Bright River 12 winters earlier....

When local electronic producer Nick Zanca was diagnosed with mono in early November, he was relieved. “Everybody who has had mono has been like, ‘Oh man, get ready for the most boring month of your life,’ and I’m like, ‘I need boring right now,’” he says. “My life has been so exciting and it’s only about to get more busy, so if I can watch Twin Peaks in my apartment and just do absolutely nothing else, I’ll be OK with that....

FESTIVAL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Attempt Veteran filmmaker Jorge Fons, whose nonlinear storytelling has made him a groundbreaking figure in Mexican cinema, spins several narratives around the 1897 assassination attempt on President Porfirio Diaz by the anarchist Arnulfo Arroyo. Subplots transpiring after the event highlight the government’s corruption and the Mexican press’s self-censorship, while extended flashbacks chronicle Arroyo’s radicalization. Unfortunately Fons does no more with the story than if he had told it chronologically: the film plays like a collection of scenes shuffled by an expert card dealer....

When the fourth annual Chicago International Movies & Music Festival wraps up April 15, so will the Wicker Park Art Center, anchor venue for the fest and a low-rent option for some of the city’s edgiest art groups. The Near Northwest Arts Council, which established the center in Saint Paul’s Community Church at 2215 W. North in 2008 and originally planned to buy the building, is being booted: they have until April 18 to clear out....