Los Angeles-based producer Steven Ellison, aka Flying Lotus, is ostensibly a hip-hop artist, but he draws from such a broad range of influences—free jazz, fusion, drum ‘n’ bass, psychedelic rock, plus of course the twin pillars of J Dilla and California medical marijuana that form the foundation of his oeuvre—that it’s usually impossible to pin him down in one genre. Though he only started attracting serious attention after his 2008 album Los Angeles, he’s already begotten a legion of imitators, which includes his fellow travelers in the Brainfeeder crew, bedroom beat makers posting on SoundCloud, and even Radiohead, whose King of Limbs had Ellison’s virtual fingerprints all over it....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Even though I’d attended two other films yesterday at the Chicago International Film Festival—the revival presentation of Nanni Moretti’s The Mass Is Over (1985) and the local premiere of Jafar Panahi’s Closed Curtain—I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to revisit Frederick Wiseman’s four-hours-long At Berkeley on a big screen. Every Wiseman film contains visual motifs that aren’t so easily noticeable on a television, and last night I was pleased to recognize several....

QI’m a short guy, and I need advice. I don’t want a small paragraph’s worth, like you gave “Below Their League” a few years ago. I need advice beyond “Women like men taller than them, get over it!” I get it. I’m short (five foot two), and most women are taller than me. And women like tall dudes just like I like slender women. Fat women may have it hard, but at least they have their fans and their own sex-object abbreviation: BBW....

In The Cherry Orchard, Anton Chekhov’s melancholy comedy about a family of Russian aristocrats who lose their estate, there appears one of the most famous passages in dramatic literature. It’s not a speech or a bit of dialogue but a stage direction: “Suddenly there is a distant sound, as if from the sky: the sound of a breaking string—dying away, sad.” This odd, abstract, almost metaphysical sound effect, symbolizing the imminent end of a way of life, has challenged directors and designers since the play’s 1904 premiere, a few months before Chekhov’s own death from tuberculosis....

Julia Thiel Round two of tasting Christmas and winter beers, and still no St. Bernardus or Corsendonk in sight. I know I’m headed straight for hell for that sin against the beer gods, but I was more interested in trying locally made brews than the already established kings of the mountain. Not all of these are strictly local—it’s more of a midwestern beer round-up than a Chicago one—but with the exception of Hoppin’ Frog in Akron, Ohio, all the breweries are within about a 30-mile radius of Chicago....

Adam Langer’s 2004 debut novel, set in West Rogers Park, seems like a logical choice for East Rogers Park’s Lifeline Theatre, but the production falters. Alan Donahue’s earnest, witty adaptation connects the dots of Langer’s sprawling work: rather than choose the narrative threads, Donahue seems to have taken a little bit of each. The late-1970s setting is evoked mostly through news snippets about the Iran hostage crisis–an event that has no apparent bearing on the characters’ lives–while Langer’s central metaphor of California Avenue as a class divide never comes into focus....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In What’s the Matter With Kansas? Frank examines the state’s liberal past and conservative present and asks why working- and middle-class Americans have voted against their own economic best interests over the past several decades. A native of Hyde Park, Winston was familiar with Frank, who graduated from the University of Chicago, and in June 2004 he attended a panel discussion at the Harold Washington Library Center that included Frank, Studs Terkel, and Howard Dean....

The 30th annual FitzGerald’s American Music Festival this Fourth of July weekend (Thu 7/1 through Sun 7/4) features rock, folk, blues, Americana, country, zydeco, funk, and more on three stages at FitzGerald’s, 6615 Roosevelt in Berwyn: the main stage and the SideBar in the club, plus a tent outside. Doors open at 4:30 PM on Thursday and Friday and at noon on Saturday and Sunday. Thursday’s highlights include funky New Orleans brass outfit Bonerama and zydeco man C....

Instrumental metal quartet Pelican are celebrating ten years as a band, but they’re not eager to characterize their longevity as an impressive feat. Their story wouldn’t make a particularly salacious episode of Behind the Music—no suicidal debauchery, no backstabbing, no fistfights. “Ultimately we’re incredibly boring in the reality-show-drama aspect,” says guitarist Laurent Lebec. “I never took anyone in this band to the hospital. No one’s had to have their stomach pumped....

Bruised Orange Theater Company’s I Saw You is a charming theatrical interpretation of “I Saw You,” “Matches,” and “X-Matches” listings from the Reader. Performed in bars, on stages or stools in the back, each show (they’ve done five since last November) features a rotating cast of three actors presenting ads published in the past year, the yearnings of their anonymous characters echoing the banter, flirting, and stares of the patrons. The material is naturally funny–“I backed up your toilet something fierce,” “Do you like to churn butter?...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On April 14, three days before the aldermanic runoff elections, 49th Ward challenger Don Gordon sent out an e-mail accusing alderman Joe Moore of shady get-out-the-vote practices in the first round of balloting, on February 27. Gordon claimed Moore had illegally campaigned inside of polling stations by introducing himself to voters as they were lined up to get their ballots....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Technically, the mayor doesn’t have the authority to appoint the CTA’s president, who acts as the agency’s chief executive officer, overseeing day-to-day operations. That power belongs to the CTA’s seven board members, four of whom are appointed by the mayor, three by the governor. Granted, CTA board members have shown a little more conscientiousness than their counterparts at the Park District or Board of Education....

The mother of all Halloween parties, the annual Music Box Massacre (3733 N. Southport) is a 24-hour marathon of classic horror movies, vintage trailers, and personal appearances, with a collectibles market in the theater lobby. Among this year’s guests are Stuart Gordon, who got his start in Chicago theater and went on to write and direct Re-Animator (1985), and Art Hindle, who appeared in Black Christmas (1974) and David Cronenberg’s The Brood (1979)....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In January a court in the southern Japanese prefecture of Kagoshima awarded about $5,000 in damages to 61-year-old Sachio Kawabata for mental anguish suffered when police tried to make him confess to violating election laws. The judge found that interrogators had abused their powers when they wrote down the names of Kawabata’s relatives and supposed messages from them (e....

If you’ve never been presented with a bowl of cha chiang mian, it could easily look to you as if someone had drowned a perfectly good tangle of noodles in crude oil. But to Koreans, the various iterations of these wheat noodles in thick, inky black bean sauce with chopped vegetables and meat represent the very definition of familiarity and comfort. They’re the Asian analog of chicken noodle soup or meat loaf with mashed potatoes and gravy....

In Kurt Vonnegut’s delightful 1961 short story “Who Am I This Time?,” a shy, bumbling small-town clerk named Harry Nash transforms into an electrifying lothario whenever he’s onstage at the community theater. Helene plays Stella to his Stanley and falls madly in love with him, but realizes that their onstage passion can be sustained offstage only if they keep throwing each other lines from famous plays. Thus Vonnegut captures the dilemma of living in the quotidian world when make-believe promises so much more....

A prequel to Das Boot? On Saturday night at the Nightingale and on Sunday at Chicago Filmmakers in Andersonville, White Light Cinema will present the 1972 hardcore feature L.A. Plays Itself from a new 2K digital restoration. The film covers a variety of approaches in its 55-minute running time, at first coming off as experimental collage (with artful superimpositions of pastoral imagery that recall Maya Deren’s work) before expanding into documentary (in its portrait of Los Angeles neighborhoods and subculture) and finally something resembling performance art (with an extended—and oddly aestheticized—demonstration of gay S&M rituals)....

Julia Thiel Afternoon outside the High Noon Saloon Locationwise, the High Noon Saloon is extremely close to Big Star: if you walked out the back door of one and there were no barriers in the way, you’d probably end up in the other restaurant. Foodwise, they’re worlds apart. The menus are similar, sure—queso fundido, guacamole, chips and salsa, tacos, margaritas—but the High Noon Saloon’s Tex-Mex doesn’t come even close to measuring up to the (admittedly high) standard that its wildly popular neighbor has set....

thursday20 Thursday20 Drug Rug Friday21 ClipseTRS-80 Saturday22 The Horses’s HaMarmosetCale ParksSollaquists of SoundWanton Looks Sunday23 Jon Snodgrass Tuesday25 Zuill Bailey and Simone Dinnerstein Wednesday26 Elvis Costello & the SugarcanesDe La Soul Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » TRS-80 Listening to TRS-80 is like getting a back rub in the path of a tornado. Though the repetitive electronic beats and cleverly varying melodic patterns massage your brain, pretty much everything else about the music is chilling and sinister: the glossy and somewhat sterile surfaces are disrupted by sprays of dissonant chords, horror-movie interludes, erratic punches of bass, sampled dialogue that invariably touches on the slavish tedium of existence, and beeping noises that vaguely mimic medical monitors or sonar pings....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The more research I do on pisco sours, though, the more confusing things become. For one, there’s the fact that Chile and Peru both claim pisco as their national spirits, and make it slightly differently. In both countries pisco is distilled from grapes—essentially, they make wine and then run it through a still (I wrote more about exactly what pisco is here)....