Once upon a time Chicago trio Frontier were as well-known for their audience-pummeling visuals—smoke machines, blinding lights, slideshow projections—as they were for their epic avant-garde blasts. At the Empty Bottle in September, the three members convened from three different states to play their first show since 2003, doubling as a wedding band of sorts—they were celebrating the nuptials of Mark Ferguson, proprietor of Roscoe Village’s Hard Boiled Records & Video. Apparently the reunion stuck, because they’re playing again February 19 at the Abbey Pub....

“In my fan fiction, I take a celebrity and I just let my imagination go wild. Being in my imagination is very relaxing for me. Me and two other girls, we have our own website called Celeb LuvGasms. Most of our stories are romance or erotica, but there are some stories that branch off to drama, suspense. They’re mostly about urban artists, like Trey Songz, Beyonce, Chris Brown. And also some actors, like Lance Gross....

Wafaa Bilal got famous by shutting himself in a room with an automated paintball gun pointed right at him. The gun was hooked up to the Internet, and viewers could shoot Bilal with yellow paint—an opportunity more than 60,000 Web users took advantage of. NB: So you wouldn’t do something like this again? NB: Did you initially think the book would include your own experiences in Iraq? Best of Chicago voting is live now....

His outre-pop band Pit Er Pat, now based in LA, just released a new album, The Flexible Entertainer, on Thrill Jockey in January. But Butchy Fuego has his drumsticks in lots of other pies. He’s playing drums with the legendary Japanese collective Boredoms in Mexico later this month and on a tour of Japan and Europe later this year. He also has a new sample-heavy cumbia project, Na Fuego. And he’s currently finishing work behind the board on the solo debut of Aska Matsumiya (Moonrats, the Sads)....

trunkclub.com Dressing yourself well is kind of like cooking—some people have a knack for it, other people need a cookbook or they’ll burn down the fucking kitchen. There’s no shame in needing a little guidance and if sartorially challenged men are willing to ask for help, they’ll have a new best friend in Trunk Club, a personal styling and delivery service that picks out clothes that are likely to work for a particular guy (based on his specifications) and sends a box of them to his door at his request....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Others could take issue with this line of thinking, but it appears to be widespread within the City Council. As 31st Ward alderman Ray Suarez puts it, “We don’t have much wiggle room.” And that’s the spirit that’s dominated the first week and a half of budget hearings. Aldermen have repeatedly expressed frustration at the city’s dire economic outlook and worried aloud about the impacts of slowed or reduced services....

Best Bets Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Since its world premiere in Chicago, the day after Christmas in 1944, The Glass Menagerie has been a gift that keeps on giving. Dozens of local troupes have put their stamp on Tennessee Williams’s moving, semiautobiographical portrait of a Depression-era Saint Louis family, and two more will try this fall. Shattered Globe Theatre, which last season delivered a potent revival of Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer, will reunite that show’s leading ladies, Linda Reiter and Allison Batty, with its director, Kevin Hagan, for a production that aims to emphasize Menagerie‘s famed fusion of verbal and visual poetry....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » My idea is a chain of Barack Obama outlet stores — warm, friendly, one-stop-shopping places where the joy of election night will linger forever. Trader O’s would make a nice name. At a Trader O’s the counters would groan under the weight of all the magnificent collectibles of the ’08 crusade . For instance, the front page of the Tuesday Sun-Times announces, “COMING TOMORROW!...

“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” Rahm Emanuel told a group of corporate captains in November 2008. They were at that moment staring down the barrel of the subprime crisis and Emanuel, newly appointed chief of staff for the newly elected Obama administration, was assuring them that the president would use the mess to justify ambitious reforms in areas like health care, education, energy, and taxes....

Matthew Hoffman A young Nora Ephron (read: prior to perpetrating such cultural abominations as You’ve Got Mail) once wrote a New York Times op-ed piece, “A Strange Kind of Simplicity,” about Ayn Rand’s seminal novel The Fountainhead and all the ways its readers tend to overlook a central point. In telling the story of the heroic, redheaded architect Howard Roark, Rand is lauding the individual over the collective, lambasting the concept of altruism, and celebrating the pursuit of self-interest as the highest form of good....

Inspired by Martin Luther King Jr., the Staple Singers went from singing gospel to “freedom songs,” and with the new We’ll Never Turn Back (Anti-) Mavis Staples demonstrates how those standards of the civil rights movement remain sadly relevant today. Updating the 60s protest canon, she ad-libs lyrics on some tracks, adding raw first-person remembrances of social injustice, and on others addresses current issues, such as the nation’s feeble response to Hurricane Katrina, with refreshing bluntness....

In a culture obsessed with youth, we’re constantly informed that sex is the glue that holds a good marriage together. But as the years pass and desire fades, most happy couples will tell you the stronger bond is shared memory: it’s the history spouses draw on every day, informing all their in-jokes and knowing glances and loving accommodations. Without memory there’s no real understanding, because the past is where all lessons dwell, and there’s no real intimacy, because the present belongs to everyone....

Audience members aren’t purposely befuddled in this sketch show the way they were in Misled, but it’s still inspired by music of the 60s and marked by creative blocking and pacing–and it still showcases some of Chicago’s best comedic talent. The evening is bookended by sketches involving kids playing garage rock; in between are bits about a dunking booth (which is cleverly devised), drunken glory-day diatribes, unintelligible intellectual conversation, and a very funny office scene in which an amiable coworker freezes time to vent his self-loathing....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Brilliant Dutch pianist Misha Mengelberg, coleader of the ICP Orchestra (which plays the fest Sunday night), opens the show with a rare solo performance. The circuslike atmosphere of a typical ICP performance, where the emphasis is on playful collective give-and-take, sometimes makes it hard to fully appreciate his imagination, skill, and command of jazz history, but Mengelberg, who turned 73 in June, has absorbed the lessons of Ellington, Monk, and Herbie Nichols like few other pianists....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At this point the list is as close to exactly how I want it as it’s going to get. Spotify’s library has a lot of pretty huge gaps. There aren’t a lot of mixtapes on it, so I couldn’t include anything from either of Action Bronson’s extremely rewarding album-length releases of the year, or Charli XCX’s “Forgiveness”, and I had to put Jeremih’s “773 Love” on there instead of the superior “Fuck U All the Time” because that’s the only song from his amazing Late Nights with Jeremih mixtape that Spotify has....

Used to be coal yards were like taverns—practically every neighborhood in the city had them. But today Paul Schoening is the last person in Chicago who retails the fuel, and he only has two customers: D’Amato’s Bakery and Coalfire Pizza. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Schoening runs the 115-year-old Gruene Coal Company, smack in the middle of Englewood, with the help of his older brother, Ed, and a friendly, doddering rottweiler named Niko....

Author & Punisher, Women & Children (Seventh Rule) Industrial music is having a bit of a moment right now, thanks to the gothier arm of the 90s revivalist movement and to Kanye’s booming digital meltdown, Yeezus, which has more in common with Skinny Puppy than with the new Jay Z. But even so, I don’t see the industrial-­tinged metal racket of Author & Punisher finding much of a mainstream audience as a result....

It’s 11 o’clock on a Saturday night and Willy Joy is working one of the most simultaneously sweet and difficult gigs in the city: opening for former Kanye West DJ A-Trak. The gig confers some prestige, but the crowd is full of Kanye fans who seem more interested in group beer chugs than dancing. Joy seems intent on getting their attention. He bounces around behind the decks, knocking back drinks and spinning everything from big-club techno to Police remixes, looking for a reaction....

Sue Kwong Last March, as it does every year, the Morning News held its annual Tournament of Books to determine the best book that was published in 2013. It coincided, as it also does every year, with the NCAA tournament to give those of us who have no interest at all in college basketball or loyalty to any team participating in the tournament (either because we did not attend Division I schools, or because our Division I school is notoriously sucky at men’s basketball) something to get excited about during the last depressing, slushy, muddy month of winter....

British choreographer Wayne McGregor has long been known for combining technology with dance. But he goes soft with Infra—sort of. Created in 2008 for London’s Royal Ballet (where McGregor is resident choreographer) and receiving its U.S. premiere here, as part of the Joffrey‘s “Winter Fire” program, this piece for 12 has a techie feel thanks to Julian Opie’s giant LED images of walking figures and Max Richter’s composition for strings, piano, and short-wave radio....