thursday24 Thursday24 Chants Robert Glasper Trio Xray Eyeballs Friday25 Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr. Robert Glasper Trio Greenhornes Nicolas Jaar Thollem McDonas Saturday26 Dawnbringer Godspeed You! Black Emperor Francois K Sunday27 Agalloch Monday28 Steve Coleman & Five Elements Wednesday30 Danielson XRAY EYEBALLS The world needs more bands willing to write a “crystal meth breakup song,” and Brooklyn’s Xray Eyeballs are here to help. A five-piece featuring three members of Golden Triangle (whose Double Jointer LP was one of my favorites of 2010), Xray Eyeballs released their debut seven-inch on HoZac this month, and it’d make a fine soundtrack to late-night leering and frothing in the downtown-at-dawn dropout discos Richard Hell once sang about....

Evanston’s Next Theatre has staged some wild plays over the last 29 years—from Tracy Letts’s Killer Joe to the current sci-fi piece, War With the Newts—but not many stranger than the real-life drama that’s unfolded there over the last few weeks. The letter cited themes and other elements original to Gaon’s work, including lines from the Next production that appeared to have been lifted verbatim from an English translation of his play....

Scott Andrews Pool/AP President Obama after delivering his inaugural address. Suggestions rolled in and the president had to make hard choices. Could he please everyone? Should he please everyone? I was biased by “Saying What Matters in 701 Words,” Lincoln scholar Ronald C. White Jr.’s powerful argument in the Sunday New York Times for Obama’s keeping his second inaugural address as short and sweet as Lincoln’s. Lincoln said his 701 words and sat down, and critics have been hailing them ever since....

Halfway to the slaughterhouse, I started choking on a pork rind. As I swerved in and back out of the oncoming lane I had a horrible thought: maybe I deserved to meet my end veering off Highway 69, gasping on this nameless, faceless, adulterated scrap of commodity pig, carelessly purchased as an expedient snack for a long drive through Wisconsin. It could be the karmic penalty for the part I was playing in the public consumption of a very different animal....

Since December 17 we’ve been counting down our favorite genre movies of 2012 on the Bleader—animation, documentary, comedy, sci-fi, suspense, horror—as well as the year’s best revivals and worst new releases. Now it’s time for the big tamale, our favorite movies of 2012. Check online for links to blogs and long reviews. —J.R. Jones 4God Bless America Bobcat Goldthwait’s comic riff on Taxi Driver might seem more scary than funny after the Newtown massacre, but it isn’t any less important....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Locavores unite: Pastoral’s summer culinary road trip leaves bright and early at 7:30 AM this Saturday, rain or shine. Breakfast will be served en route to the Urbana-Champaign area, where stops will include a farmer’s market, lunch at Champaign’s Cafe Luna, and Prairie Fruits Farm, Illinois’s only farmstead goat dairy–which means its cheeses are made from milk from the farm’s own herd....

ELECTRONIC | Debuts by Sarah Weis and Supreme Cuts Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last week newbie NYC label Small Plates announced it would release Trouble, the debut EP from Chicago electronic smooth-jam act Supreme Cuts (right). Mike Perry and Austin Keultjes have worked together for close to two years (they were both in Dirty Diamonds too), but Supreme Cuts started out making sample-based hip-hop tracks, none of which they formally released....

Stanley Greenberg: Architecture Under Construction Art Institute of Chicago Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In his new book, Architecture Under Construction, Greenberg records the prehistory of an eclectic array of recent buildings by big-name architects, providing a corrective for the kind of photographs that eventually presented them to the world. As it happens, the last building included in the book is the Art Institute’s Renzo Piano-designed Modern Wing, in which a dozen of Greenberg’s 30-by-40-inch black-and-white prints are on display through September 6 in a show called “Stanley Greenberg: Architecture Under Construction....

The 51st annual University of Chicago Folk Festival, presented by the school’s Folklore Society, features evening concerts of folk, bluegrass, blues, Irish, cajun, and gospel music Fri-Sun 2/11-2/13 at Mandel Hall (1131 E. 57th) and daytime workshops conducted by festival artists Sat-Sun 2/12-2/13 at Ida Noyes Hall (1212 E. 59th). Notable acts (many perform on more than one day) include bluesmen Byther Smith and Eddie C. Campbell, Irish concertina player John Williams, gospel group the Evening Light Brothers, and old-time music devotee Frank Fairfield....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last Saturday I saw the Turkish film Elegy (1972) at Doc Films’s ongoing Yilmaz Güney series (which continues tomorrow night at 7 PM with the director’s most widely celebrated movie, Yol). I liked it for its suspense, but I had trouble understanding the plot. I asked one of the programmers afterward if he could explain why gendarmes were hunting down the main characters, who are never shown doing anything illegal....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’m in Vasterås, Sweden, a little city about an hour west of Stockholm, for the Perspectives Festival, curated by saxophonist Mats Gustafsson. The three-day event kicked off Thursday with a packed program, and there’s lots more today and tomorrow–a dynamic mixture of free jazz, noise, experimental electronics, and improvised music. Naturally the lineup is heavy on European talent, but there are some notable Americans on the schedule, including trumpeter Peter Evans, who plays solo, bassist Darin Gray and drummer Chris Corsano (in a trio with legendary Japanese free-jazz saxophonist Akira Sakata), pianist Marilyn Crispell, and noisy improv behemoth Borbetomagus....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » An essay by British critic Stuart Nicholson caught my eye as I was leafing through the March 2007 issue of the British jazz magazine Jazzwise. It suggests that the days of American jazz musicians riding Europe’s gravy train may be coming to an end. Many American jazz musicians rely on the European circuit to make a living, but with the growing popularity of the European scene, which has forged its own take on jazz over the last couple of decades, Americans are finding fewer gigs, and promoters are beginning to balk at the fees demanded by their booking agents (to cover travel expenses and so forth)....

The Reader‘s review of Acre last week became obsolete almost immediately. The seasonally oriented Andersonville spot, which shares chef Carlos Ysaguirre with neighboring Anteprima, originally offered separate menus for the tavern side and the dining room, though you could order from either wherever you sat. That was one too many menus to please critic Mike Sula, who experienced some misses alongside the hits. But just after the Reader went to press, the restaurant tweeted: “After much debate, Acre is moving to a single dinner menu next week....

Steven Sebring Patti Smith Summer touring season is ramping up, and while more bands are getting routed through Chicago there are some that can’t quite get here for one reason or another. Sweden’s Hypocrisy was supposed to play Ultra Lounge tonight, but the group had to cancel its whole tour; according to the metal band’s site the members of Hypocrisy recently learned that they would not be able to pick up their travel visas until late June due to an influx of work at the department of Homeland Security....

The Chicago Improv Festival celebrates its tenth anniversary with 45 sketch and improv groups from around the world. According to founder and executive director Jonathan Pitts, the first event attracted 1,800 viewers; last year’s festival drew 7,500. This is perhaps the best opportunity all year to check out the cutting edge of improvisation, a form that continues to fuel the entertainment industry, from The Daily Show and TV commercials to theater and film....

Headlines tout organics as the fastest-growing sector in agriculture, but with high-volume stores like Wal-Mart and Target getting in on the game, demand is outpacing supply. It’s entirely likely that store shelves marked “organic” are filled with produce from industrial farms or China, Mexico, and other foreign sources, rather than the small-scale regional family farms the label conjures. 1547 Rockton | Caledonia, IL 61011 | 815-389-2746 | angelicorganics.com Best of Chicago voting is live now....

I would imagine that having the sort of life where you can call up Trent Reznor just to chat or get Chan Marshall to record backup vocals for your album would be pretty fucking rad. But if El-P derives any joy from it, he’s not letting on. The rapper, producer, and Def Jux honcho has always been one of the tweakiest dudes in the rap underground, which loves charismatic MCs who can convince you they’re mentally unstable, and his new I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead (Definitive Jux) sounds like a straight-up nervous breakdown....

On a recent Friday afternoon 25-year-old Mike Salvatore was standing on the back porch of a Lincoln Park three-flat gripping the bottom of a 12-foot ladder leading to the roof. His friend Jordan Shea had just climbed up and was straddling the peak with a staple gun in hand. “Do me a favor,” Salvatore called up to him. “Don’t kill yourself, please.” Then a train roared by no more than four feet from the roof’s edge....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last August when I spotted a stop work order on the Cincinnati-themed lounge cum chili parlor Cinners, building out in a tiny space in Lincoln Square, I wondered if it was a vanity project of some neighborhood kid of Greek extraction whose dad owned the building. After all, in ancient times, Macedonians invented Cincinnati three-, four-, and five-way chili, and though I’m not enough of a food historian to theorize with any confidence, it is tempting to imagine a connection between the Greek dish pastitsio and the Queen City’s tomatoey stew, redolent of baking spices, plopped over spaghetti, all covered with cheese....

The annual Great Chicago Places and Spaces, a weekend-long celebration of local architecture and design, begins sedately enough with Friday’s 6 PM opening discussion about social housing and community building, with architect Carol Ross Barney, activists Rick Lowe and Raul Raymundo, and former journalist Curtis Lawrence (Chase Auditorium, 10 S. Dearborn). Seating is first-come, first-served starting at 5:15. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » By early the next morning, however, all hell breaks loose as architecture buffs start lining up to get tickets for their top picks from more than 200 free tours led by architects, designers, docents, and other knowledgeable guides....