Rachel Damon plows the prairie in her delicately rendered, often dark new 30-minute sextet, Swath. In the so-called “bread suit” section, dancers attempt to paste hunks of bread onto a woman, for reasons that are unclear. “Is she feeding them?” asks Damon, the head of Chicago-based Synapse Arts. “Or trying to get away?” In another section, a man dresses a dead animal, hacking at it and yanking off its hide. To survive, frontier folk do what they have to....

The Lazarus Project Aleksandar Hemon (Riverhead Books) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Vladimir Brik, a Bosnian living in Chicago in 2004, is married to a brain surgeon and has a well-read column in the Reader, where he writes about being an immigrant in America. He wants money to research a book about the experience of a particular immigrant—Lazarus Averbuch, an eastern European Jewish teenager from the turn of the century—but refuses to ask his wife for help because he fears that she and her family already see him as a “wastrel or a slacker or a lazy Eastern European....

Just minutes after I caught wind of last Thursday’s big news, I got a text message from one of my friends: “Do you believe Michael Jackson died?” In the 80s and 90s certain countercultural types liked to riff on the notion of a Church of Elvis, but when you get right down to it, Elvis’s mythos is too tame to support a church—even a fake church. Aside from the interior design at Graceland and the massiveness of his pill habit, there wasn’t much that felt supernatural about the guy....

Q: I am a 16-year-old female. I have been in a monogamous relationship with a boy for seven months. My first, his too. A couple of months in, we began to explore masturbating each other and oral sex. He has gone down on me three times, but I have never given him a blow job. I’m scared to because I’m scared he will be disappointed. We fight sometimes because he feels it’s unfair that he goes down on me and I don’t go down on him....

Every Tuesday morning a refrigerated white truck with an anthropomorphic pig painted on its side pulls up in front of a house on a tree-lined street in a North Shore suburb. A Wisconsin farmer emerges and unloads three to four boxes filled with pork shoulders and bellies butchered from naturally raised pigs. He walks across the lawn and hands them off through the front door before driving on to the city to make his regular deliveries at the likes of North Pond and Frontera Grill....

Bree Housley, author of We Hope You Like This Song: An Overly Honest Story About Friendship, Death, and Mix Tapes, downloads: How Was Your Week? I wake up every Friday with one goal: download Julie Klausner’s podcast, How Was Your Week? Perhaps this makes me sound a bit lazy, but oh man, does she make me laugh. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Whether she’s crooning along to Brian McKnight’s “Ready to Learn” (look it up, people, so ridiculous) or getting to the bottom of important things with her guests, like why Mrs....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mayor Daley and his top aides–and by extension most aldermen–are big on the idea of making Chicago the greenest city in the country. In fact, some seem to believe it’ll be true if they simply say it enough. The incantations are now uttered at just about every city event remotely linked to an environmental issue—it doesn’t take much except a nearby trash can and accompanying blue recycling bin—and Tuesday’s joint meeting of the City Council’s finance, environment, and economic development committees was no exception....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » So are we still friends, Roland, or is 10,000 B.C. the deal breaker? Not that it’s any worse than the rest of the schlock he’s cranked out: a little of this, a little of that, a whole lotta going through the motions—to get the job done, get the damn thing marketed, brute commercial savvy being the first item of business....

Truth be told, I was skeptical going in to The Grandmaster, Wong Kar-wai’s long-gestating biopic about famed martial arts teacher Ip Man (1893-1972). The movie had been described as a kung fu picture and a historical epic—genres that Wong, for all his filmmaking genius, didn’t seem particularly suited to. As demonstrated by such touchstones as Chungking Express (1994) and In the Mood for Love (2000), the Hong Kong director’s greatness lies in his ability to capture moments and sensations that most filmmakers overlook....

Fredrick Holland Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The best of Holland’s 16 antiauthoritarian works at Flatfile, part of a joint show with Dread Scott, raise pointed questions about power and are carefully, cleanly designed. Bill of Rights (Revised) is a large wall-mounted text with ten articles, at least some of which Holland agrees with: “Legislative members shall earn no more than twice the current poverty level,” for example....

Now in its 23rd year, The African Festival of the Arts has grown to become Chicago’s largest neighborhood festival. Held in Washington Park, it honors the African diaspora with four days of attractions from several continents—arts, crafts, dancing, food, music, and more. The Dee Parmer Woodtor Stage hosts the big names, and the World Music Stage presents music and dance with a special focus on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe. On Friday the music begins at 5 PM; among the acts on the Woodtor Stage are local R&B singer Joan Collaso & the Eleven Divas and Charles Neville & Youssoupha Sidibe with the Mystic Rhythms, while the World Music Stage bookings include performances from Avian Hightower & Full Circle and Taylor Moore....

On the Pink Line at Madison and Paulina The question isn’t where it should go but why it isn’t there already. Nothing makes less sense than the sight of Pink Line trains sailing across Madison two blocks from the United Center on game nights without stopping. (Imagine the Red Line stopping at Belmont and Sheridan but racing past Wrigley.) The CTA helpfully points out that there are express buses to the Loop outside the stadium, and the Pink Line’s Ashland stop is just a few blocks away....

Eric Penna Colleen Green If you’re like me you’ve spent so much of the past couple days listening to Chance the Rapper‘s excellent new Acid Rap mixtape that you need to take a break from it and cleanse your palate with some other music—any other music. Fortunately, there’s such a bounty of great shows coming through town that you don’t have to settle for just any band. Tonight there’s Michel Doneda & Tatsuya Nakatani at Elastic, Qwel & Maker at Reggie’s Rock Club, Goat at Empty Bottle, and Daniel Knox & John Atwood’s 14 15 111 at Intuit....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tuesday night a reception was held in the LA Times building for Jim Newton, the departing editor of that paper’s editorial page. Told to slash his staff, Newton decided to quit instead. Attending the reception, according to laobserved.com, were the present mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa, former mayor Richard Riordan, Sheriff Lee Baca, and local billionaire Eli Broad, who’d hoped to buy the Times before the entire Tribune Company was taken over last year by Sam Zell....

Driving through the south side one day last week, Seventh Ward alderman Darcel Beavers realized that there was something oddly familiar about the campaign billboards lining the streets. They showed her opponent, Sandi Jackson standing with her husband, Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. “I’m thinking, ‘I’ve seen that picture of the congressman before,’” Beavers says. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Then it struck her. The image of Congressman Jackson was identical to the one that adorned campaign posters last year during the primary and general elections, when he posed with several candidates he’d endorsed: circuit court judge Joy Cunningham, Metropolitan Water Reclamation District candidates Frank Avila Jr....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As mentioned in this week’s Gossip Wolf, this Saturday is the first annual International Cassette Store Day—a Record Store Day-esque celebration of the once forgotten and recently reappreciated audio medium of cassette tapes—and Avondale’s Bric-a-Brac Records is the only shop in the state celebrating the holiday. In honor of the occasion, labels from around the world will be releasing exclusive short runs of some awesome albums on cassette, including Fucked Up’s breakthrough Hidden World, this year’s lone Guided by Voices release English Little League, and the 1983 self-titled debut from Riot Fest act Suicidal Tendencies....

September 1306—Ten Years Later The Dance Center of Columbia College celebrates ten years in its current space with a daylong event featuring performances, classes, workshops, and more. 10 AM-11 PM, Dance Center of Columbia College, 1306 S. Michigan, 312-369-8330. Harvest Chicago Contemporary Dance Three evenings of performance presented by Nicole Gifford. 10/1-10/3, Ruth Page Center, 1016 N. Dearborn, 312-952-3615, $16-$20. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Gods, Monsters, and Heroes Innervation Dance Cooperative premieres a contemporary rock ballet based on Greek myths and set to the music of popular artists including Pink, Feist, and Coldplay....

As if to teach the rest of us a lesson in true Scottish thrift, Irvine Welsh has wrung a wide variety of uses from the material in Trainspotting, his celebrated 1993 novel about Edinburgh heroin addicts. There’s the stage adaptation by Harry Gibson. And the movie, famously directed by Danny Boyle. Welsh released his own literary sequel, Porno, in 2002. And his 500-odd-page prequel, Skagboys, came out just last month....

A Mano A basement little brother to Bin 36, A Mano retooled earlier this year after a burst pipe shut it down for over a month. Its menu and wine list are vast and wide-ranging, in fact potentially unnavigable, but with careful selection you can build a great meal. An assortment of six salumi for $28 is a sweet deal that affords the chance to sample the likes of mole sausage and culatello, the soft, buttery nucleus of a ham cured prosciutto style....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Most subjects said they’d flip the switch. Very well, they were told, but now suppose yourself on a bridge that crosses the track. A fat man shares the bridge with you. You could shove him off the bridge and onto the track, which would halt the trolley, costing him his life but saving five others. Or you could let the tragedy take its course....