Pieholden Suite Sound (2116 W. Chicago) is a recording studio tucked inside an obscure building in Ukrainian Village. The one-story superstructure might have been a blockhouse. Or maybe a kindergarten. Navigating the labyrinth of hallways, I pass a bathroom with stalls and school desks just before the space opens up to a hoard of instruments. Vintage guitars line one wall; a live room stuffed with pianos, Wurlitzers, and a virginal harpsichord acts as fodder for a keyboard player’s wet dream....

For their first nonfiction feature, New York-based indie filmmakers Joshua and Benny Safdie (Daddy Longlegs) tell the story of a onetime pro-basketball hopeful who lapsed into obscurity after failing to make the NBA draft in 2002. The movie communicates a sense of righteous anger about wheeling and dealing in professional sports (which one interviewee compares to the slave trade) and about American celebrity culture in general. At the same time, it’s a spirited experiment in documentary form, with the directors showing great imagination in their fusion of new and archival footage and conveying a sharp dramatic sensibility in their portrait of Cooke, which they assemble largely from offhand moments....

We’re Rollin’, They’re Hatin’ at Version>07 INFO 773-837-0145 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But in fact Dungeons & Dragons is doing just fine, thank you, despite (or perhaps because of) the enormous popularity of similar online games like World of Warcraft. It’s currently owned by Wizards of the Coast, which made a pile of money with Magic: the Gathering and in 1997 bought original publisher TSR....

Some might pick the #63 east from Midway, with its route through eastern European, Middle Eastern, Hispanic, and African-American enclaves. Others might consider the State Street bus heading south from Navy Pier through downtown and the barbecue joints of the old south side all the way into middle-class Chatham. But for my money, the best postcard of the city is through the window of the westbound Lawrence bus. Starting at Marine Drive, with the northern tip of Lincoln Park to the east, you bounce past recovery houses toward the live-music hub formed by the Aragon, the Riv, and the Green Mill....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Maybe it’s the nonliteral simulations. Dusk is essentially the sum of its own bad jokes and nihilistic urges, but “Planet”‘s energies lie elsewhere, in the referential pileup and re-created textures: all those 70s B-movie phantoms–Carpenter, Bava, Romero (though maybe Shaun of the Dead‘s more relevant here)–trundling through the muck, like grainy, blood-spattered hommages on the walls of Plato’s cave....

Justin Timberlake The ongoing collision between mainstream pop and underground club music began in the early aughts when megastars like Britney Spears began recording noisy, aggressively dance-floor-focused singles that bore the avant garde influence of electroclash producers, and DJs responded by making tracks like “Toxic” and Justin Timberlake’s “My Love” staples at even the edgiest, most secretive club nights. Now, with ur-hipster Diplo at very near the top of the pop music A-list and relatively obscure EDM artists signing marquee recording deals, it can be hard to remember exactly how strange and unprecedented this felt at the time....

According to her Twitter feed, Kiran Advani has been officially named the Fashion Programming Director for the city’s fashion initiatives, effectively taking over the job vacated by Melissa Gamble last May. Advani, a publicist who was hired by the city to handle promotion for fashion events in February 2010, has been helping to handle Gamble’s responsibilities ever since her resignation and was effectively doing her job for the last several months....

Dmitry Samarov doesn’t present a very enticing image of the garage where he leases his Yellow Cab and gets it repaired—or of most of the people who pass through it. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Samarov has been blogging, tweeting, writing, drawing, and painting for years about his experiences ferrying passengers around the city. But his reputation as a keen observer of humanity’s more peculiar specimens is sure to grow with the October publication of Hack: Stories From a Chicago Cab (University of Chicago Press)....

Peter Margasak, Reader staff writer Timo Andres, Home Stretch The second album from young pianist and composer Timo Andres bursts with creativity, vaulting over the divide between conservative and radical, past and future. His piece Home Stretch accelerates through three uninterrupted parts, with his pulsing piano surging and relaxing amid meticulous chamber arrangements. In a dramatic segue, he follows it with Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 26 (aka Coronation), adding dazzling left-hand figures (which Mozart never completed)....

No one can accuse Eugene Jarecki of thinking small: his masterful 2005 documentary Why We Fight took on no less than the military-industrial complex, and his new one plunges into the 40-year, $1 trillion war on drugs. Jarecki rides with dealers and with cops, questioning judges and prison workers, and though everyone seems to hate this futile war, no one has a clue how to end it. That’s because the war itself has become an American economic engine, funding an exploding prison-industrial complex that’s sustained by mandatory-minimum sentencing and racially targeted drug laws....

QI have been insecure about the way my vagina looks for as long as I can remember. When I was young, I would fantasize about the day I would grow pubic hair long enough to cover its unsightliness. That day never came, and I was left with an enormous insecurity about it. My labia minora is oversize quite a bit. I know that this is not uncommon, but its unattractiveness holds me back from receiving oral sex....

When Mack Sevier, former pit man at Barbara Ann’s BBQ, opened his own place, Uncle John’s Barbecue (337 E. 69th, 773-892-12330, a few years back, lovers of his unique style of Chicago hot links let out a collective whoop. There’s only one place to get these heavenly sausages—lightly charred smoky pork links, aggressively spiced with sage and topped with a drizzle of hot sauce—and that’s from Sevier’s wood-fired smoker. Meaty spareribs are smoked directly over the wood, resulting in a crisp, fat-in-the-fire outer layer that yields to a moist and toothsome interior....

Q I was listening to the radio yesterday morning, and I heard an interview with you about your It Gets Better campaign. I was saddened by and frustrated with your comments regarding people of faith and their perpetuation of bullying. As someone who loves the Lord and does not support gay marriage, I can honestly say I was heartbroken to hear about the young man who took his own life....

“I get mixed reviews,” says Little Village resident Maggie Chavez, when people see her collection of nearly 200 Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls. Some are amazed at how many she has, but a lot of people just find them “terrifying.” Not Chavez: “I think they’re beautiful.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » She started her collection five years ago, when she saw a doll in a resale shop....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One of the festival’s biggest buzz movies was Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler, which ended a distribution drought on Monday when Fox Searchlight picked up the U.S. rights for $4 million. Its main attraction is Mickey Rourke’s unimpeachable performance as a washed-up wrestling star who’s still riding on the fumes of his 80s glory when a coronary forces him into retirement for good....

Chicago could be facing its first subway series since, well, since almost before there was a subway. It’s just that it will be transplanted — if it does happen — to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. That’s where both Northwestern and DePaul begin play Thursday in the Women’s (softball) College World Series. Among all the top-seeded teams only DePaul, at 14, is an interloper among the final eight, having beaten No. 3 Oklahoma in the super regionals last weekend....

Is it true U.S. Postal Service workers are more likely than other occupations to “go postal” on coworkers? Or is that just a perception from media reporting of these events? –Scott, via e-mail Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If I may speak on behalf of the nation’s media, while we certainly deserve some of the blame for making the postal service sound like a psycho hothouse, you ain’t sticking us with all of it....

Pharrell Williams in the “Blurred Lines” video Pharrell Williams is having a fantastic year. Right now “Blurred Lines,” which he produced for Robin Thicke (who’s starting to look and sound increasingly like a more Vegas-y James Murphy), is sitting at the top of the Hot 100. Two spots below it is Daft Punk’s song of the year contender “Get Lucky,” which he sings lead on. He also produced a new song for this year’s Destiny’s Child greatest hits collection, Love Songs, and two tracks on Kelly Rowland’s Talk a Good Game, which should go down as one of the year’s best R&B albums....

American baritone Thomas Hampson has one of the world’s great voices. Warm, rich, and velvety, it can range from a hushed quiver to the kind of ravishing high-voltage fortissimo needed for Wagner–he won a Grammy in 2003 for his recording of TannhŠuser. With the charisma of an opera star and the poetic soul of a lieder singer, he’s a riveting performer, able to fully inhabit a role and evoke its emotional depths....

As a warm-up for her early-2011 album for Rhymesayers, south-side MC Psalm One is releasing a new ten-song EP produced by MP, Earmint, Fluffy, and her bad self. Nine tracks from Woman at Work Vol. 1 will be free to download from psalmone.tv on May 1; a tenth, the single “Better Than My Last,” is already streaming free and downloadable for $1. Speaking to Gossip Wolf, Psalm said she’s completed tracks for the just-released DJ Jay Illa mixtape Return of the Backpacks 2....