Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In 2008 the SoSeditions label released an untitled collaboration between Chicago sound artist Olivia Block and New York experimental filmmakers Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder. Around the time it was released, I wrote on this blog about it: “[Block has] devised a process-based approach to parallel the one that created the visuals. Her collaborators used projected film as their source material, creating ghostly effects with puffs of steam or fog and the inherent artifacts of video recording; Block used what she calls the ‘halos of static’ generated when she subjected cheap phone pickups to the electromagnetic disturbances around her CD player and computer, adding digital effects, bits of prerecorded music, and lots of edits to shape a flowing stream of sound that constantly shifts in density and color....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Show: Jazmine Sullivan “opening for Mary J. Blige is a perfect tonic for those who miss old Mary—you know, Mary before she said no to more drama, back when all her songs had at least one verse about all the crying she’d been doing. Sullivan has a very Mary-esque combination of intensity and vulnerability, and their big, throaty, gospel-trained voices are not dissimilar,” writes Jessica Hopper....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mary L. Dedinsky, Web Editor, MetroRussell Working, General Assignment Reporter/Writer, Oak Brook BureauSusan Diesenhouse, Real Estate Feature WriterJosephine Napolitano, General Assignment Reporter/Writer, Tinley Park Bureau.Eric Benderoff, Technology Reporter, Financial NewsDavid Trotman-Wilkins, Staff PhotographerCandice Cusic, Staff PhotographerJohn Smierciak, Staff PhotographerCharles Cherney, Staff PhotographerWilliam Grady, Deputy Bureau Chief, Schaumburg BureauBeth Botts, Garden Writer, House & HomesRobert K. Elder, Reporter, LiveLou Carlozo, Reporter, SmartBrenda Butler, Assistant Editor, Chicago Tribune MagazineLilah Lohr, Assistant Books EditorJessica Reaves, Reporter, Chicago Tribune MagazineTom Hundley, Reporter, Chicago Tribune MagazineSusan Kuczka, General Assignment Reporter/Writer, Vernon Hills BureauStorer Rowley, National EditorJames P....

For a genre often seen as futuristic and technology driven, house music is stubbornly traditional. Fans around the world can rattle off its genesis story, in which DJs Frankie Knuckles and Ron Hardy are prophets and the site of the Warehouse and the Music Box is holy ground. Producers still load up their tracks with commands to “jack your body,” just like Steve “Silk” Hurley did on his genre-defining 1986 single....

Natassia Kinski in Tess I was satisfied to see how well the DCP (Digital Cinema Package) restoration of Roman Polanski’s Tess, which screens next weekend at the Gene Siskel Film Center, preserves the texture of the film’s cinematography. Shot on Panavision equipment at a time when it yielded particularly grainy images (think of Robert Altman’s Nashville or Polanski’s own Chinatown), Tess has a rough and speckled beauty like that of an old stone....

But at least it’s good news: what’s become widely known as the TIF Sunshine Ordinance will almost certainly pass the full council tomorrow. It will mandate that the city’s Department of Community Development post extensive documentation about the creation and use of tax increment financing funds, from details about expenditures to records of city oversight, assuming those documents exist. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Several went so far as to declare that this should be the start of a much broader conversation....

Last fall New Colony scored a well-deserved mini-hit with James Asmus’s domestic drama Calls to Blood, about an achingly perfect young married couple torn apart after their deep, dark secret comes to light. That secret is so improbable and melodramatic the play should collapse as quickly as the protagonists’ relationship, but Asmus holds everything together with uncanny insights into the most extremes of human emotions (oh, and the actors were amazing)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tonight at 10 PM, Lincoln Hall will present the Chicago premiere of a fine documentary about singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson, who burst into the mass consciousness with his rendition of “Everybody’s Talkin’” on the soundtrack of Midnight Cowboy (1969) and went on to make a series of eclectic albums, most notably the multiple-Grammy-winner Nilsson Schmilsson (1971). My own enthusiasm for Nilsson centers mostly on his first two albums, Pandemonium Shadow Show (1967) and Aerial Ballet (1968), both made while he was an obscure darling of the Beatles (they named him as their “favorite American group”) and was dishing out great numbers for Three Dog Night (“One”) and the Monkees (“Cuddly Toy,” “Daddy’s Song”)....

Cambria Harkey Patty Griffin I’ve never cared much for the music of Patty Griffin, and in recent years I’ve tried harder and harder to, thanks largely to the excellent folks she’s been working with—Buddy Miller, Robert Plant, Shooter Jennings, John Doe, and Gurf Morlix, among others. But until I heard her terrific new album, American Kid (New West), I just got bored. She’s a wonderful songwriter with a pretty voice, but I’ve found her records too slick and ethereal, pushing folksy, rootsy sensibilities toward polished pop....

Pivot Arts formed last fall with a focus on Uptown, Andersonville, and Edgewater. Through 6/22, this new annual affair (Fable Festival in a previous life) features theater, music, dance, and sometimes snacks—often all at the same time—in historic venues like an old Uptown vaudeville theater and bank building. Some highlights follow; see the website for a full schedule. On the first night, after Ice Cream and Improv at Lickity Split Frozen Custard & Sweets (Thu 6/6, 4 PM, 6056 N....

Restaurant listings are culled from the Reader Restaurant Finder, an online database of more than 4,200 Chicago-area restaurants. Restaurants are reviewed by staff, contributors, and (where noted) individual Reader Restaurant Raters. Though reviewers try to reflect the Raters’ input, reviews should be considered one person’s opinion; the Raters’ collective opinions are best expressed in the numbers. Complete searchable listings, Raters’ comments, and information on how to become a Rater are at chicagoreader....

Q I have a problem. A key part of it, I’m sure, is that I’m a recovering anorexic who’s still struggling a great deal to eat normal and healthy portions of food. A friend and I have recently become friends with benefits. He lives very far away, so we primarily indulge through IMs. He knows I have issues with food, though he doesn’t know to what extent. Normally, I try to be GGG, even trying out a bit of vore in our role-playing and making it a regular thing since he really enjoys it....

Don’t you just love statistics? The endearing way they’ll do almost anything for you? Their awesome power to impress–with or without substance? Better than Paris Hilton at grabbing headlines and malleable as a shmoo, they’re the favorite tools of anyone with an agenda. Last month, when the U.S. House of Representatives finally approved a record $35 million increase in funding for the NEA, Americans for the Arts claimed a victory, noting that their recent study, “Arts & Economic Prosperity III,” had been a factor in winning the vote....

Press materials for the upcoming Seymour Rosofsky show “Xylophone Solo” describe the painter’s early subjects as “little monsters,” and that’s not just a cute attempt to reclaim the term from Lady Gaga. Rosofsky, who went to that great monsters’ ball in the sky in 1981, was part of the Monster Roster, a postwar Chicago movement that also included the likes of H.C. Westermann, Leon Golub, and Karl Wirsum. Based at the School of the Art Institute, the group championed a surrealistic form of representationalism at the height of the abstract-expressionist vogue....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A new five-year analysis of the nation’s death rates recently released by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the suicide rate among 45-to-54-year-olds increased nearly 20 percent from 1999 to 2004, the latest year studied, far outpacing changes in nearly every other age group. (All figures are adjusted for population.) “Steve Neal spent Monday night in Northwestern Hospital, where they were running tests, so he called up Harry Caray’s Restaurant and had them bring over dinner....

Hitler’s secret? Volume. He was the Henry Ford of genocide, using economies of scale to answer the Jewish question with utmost efficiency. Which may be why Holocaust plays are always so intimate, so tightly focused on a single character: the very extravagance of such an approach–millions of stories told one at a time!–constitutes a long, slow rebuke. In Gilles Segal’s play, it’s Finkelbaum’s turn. A traumatized survivor of Birkenau, Finkelbaum works so hard at denial that he never leaves the flat he shares with a life-size puppet/effigy of his dead wife....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Word just came out today that local synthesizer enthusiasts Walter Meego will be releasing their first full-length album through Almost Gold Recordings, home to Peter Bjorn and John. The record, which may or may not be called Voyager, won’t be out until late 2007 or early 2008, but if you beep over to their MySpace page you can peep some pretty-finished sounding electro-pop demos....

Room 21 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jerry Kleiner (Red Light, Marche, Opera, etc) knows how to razzle-dazzle ’em. Room 21, his latest project, follows his favorite scenario: reclaim a space with headline-grabbing potential and give it an over-the-top makeover as a destination restaurant in a soon-to-be-hot neighborhood. In this case, the backstory–printed on the menu–involves a Prohibition-era warehouse owned by Al Capone, Eliot Ness’s first bust, and an escape passage ending in a door labeled “Room 21....

“Jesus is a trick on niggers,” says antihero Hazel Motes in Flannery O’Connor’s novel Wise Blood. The title character of Thomas Bradshaw’s hilarious, discomfiting new satire, Mary, says exactly the same thing about the Emancipation Proclamation. Mary is a black, middle-aged domestic servant, and, as she sees it, “Black folks went from one form of slavery to another. They went from being slaves to sharecroppers, couldn’t vote, then the Klan came along with their foolish violence....

Apologies for the hyperbole, but Wrigleyville is the worst, especially after the sun goes down. The sidewalks are overcrowded with dead-eyed, zombielike drunks hopping from one loud bar to the next in an endless quest to get blitzed beyond repair. It’s a fine place if that’s your prerogative, but it’s not much fun for the rest of us, especially if, like me, you don’t drink. It’d be easy enough to avoid the area if it wasn’t also the home to some great venues for entertainment—there’s Metro, iO, Wrigley Field (duh), and, though slightly outside the magnificent mile of bro bars (but still close enough to its heart), the Music Box....