Haunted Places The Fear This haunted house is adults-only on Thursdays and Sundays; a kid-friendly version (the lights are kept on) is Saturdays and Sundays. Through 10/31: Thu 6-10 PM, Fri-Sat 6-11 PM, Sun 6-10 PM, Wed 10/27, 6-10 PM, Navy Pier, 600 E. Grand, 312-595-7437, navypier.com, $20-$25. Seadog Haunted Cruises Costumed tour guides tell stories about Chicago massacres, hauntings, and the like, all with an eye toward local architecture. Through 10/31: Fri-Sun 7:15 PM, Navy Pier, 600 E....

One afternoon two years ago, Eric Fleischauer, a filmmaker, and Jason Lazarus, a photographer, met for coffee. Gradually the conversation turned to one of their shared obsessions: GIFs, the infinitely looping minimovies ubiquitous on the Internet. Given their jobs, they were particularly interested in where GIFs came from and what they were becoming. “The file format starts to be a blender of culture,” Lazarus adds. Some groupings made sense—cats, pizza—but others required more consideration....

These are the moments a City Hall reporter lives for: My girlfriend and I were having dinner at a downtown restaurant recently, and we couldn’t help but overhear the couples in the next booth kvetching about Chicago’s parking meter lease deal. “I never thought I’d see the day when Daley was vulnerable,” she concluded. “But he is.” There’s no doubt his stock has fallen. But Daley isn’t just any politician. I predict his poll numbers and popularity on the street will have little bearing on whether he runs again—and even less on whether he can win....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Today, thanks to the excellent blog Matsuli, I discovered a recently launched blog from the Africa service of Voice of America, an operation that broadcasts all over the continent in English, French, Portuguese, Amharic, Tigrigna, Oromo, Hausa, Swahili, Ndebele, Shona, Kinyarwanda, Kirundi, and Somali. The music holdings of the Africa service include more than 10,000 reels of tape and several thousand more albums, 45s, cassettes, and CDs....

ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) may have lodged itself in the public consciousness with its angry publicity stunts—disrupting a broadcast of the CBS Evening News, invading a mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York—but as this documentary reveals, the organization may have been most impressive for its disciplined mastery of medical fact and public health policy. Director David France chronicles the chaotic history of ACT UP (and its splinter organization, Treatment Action Group) from March 1987, when it was founded by playwright Larry Kramer, through the 1996 medical breakthrough that now enables people to live with HIV/AIDS....

Anteprima Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I was a little surprised to hear that the owner of this so-called “regionally inspired,” “rustic,” tin-ceilinged Italian spot was also a partner in the generic barstaurant Charlie’s Ale House next door. But Marty Fosse also ran the front of the house at Spiaggia at one time, and while Anteprima is a far cry from that rarefied temple of la cucina italiana, his new place shows promise as a neighborhood standby....

While you were distracted by all the NATO nonsense that’s been consuming our city for the last few weeks, Mayor Rahm Emanuel has been on the move as usual. Let’s start with the corporate handouts. Emanuel turned over $29.5 million in desperately needed property tax dollars to a consortium of wealthy investors who clearly don’t need the money. In the mayor’s defense, it wasn’t his idea. He was dusting off a bad one left over from his Mayor Richard Daley....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Fans of erstwhile Chicagoan Jim O’Rourke might be wondering what the musician/songwriter/producer has been up to lately (aside from his frequent output of experimental recordings). One way to find out is this semirecent interview with Time Out Tokyo, in which he discusses moving to Japan, Led Zeppelin’s Presence, and his first song-based album in 12 years. Recently he opened a Bandcamp page virtually out of the blue and released a series of albums called Steamroom 1-8, each of which consists of one or two long ambient compositions....

If you want to see 50-odd (and 50 odd) aspiring comics in one night without paying a cent of admission or fighting your way through north-side streets packed with yelping trixies and beer bros, you can’t beat the Wednesday open mike at Cole’s Bar in Logan Square. Started and originally hosted by stand-ups Cameron Esposito and Adam Burke (another stand-up, Ken Witzgall, has now taken over as MC), the backroom show supplies a friendly, supportive environment in which comics of every type and skill level can take the stage for three minutes and hone their craft....

The Web site for these Norwegian black-metal legends reads like a tombstone, proclaiming their lifespan as 1991-2001, but they’ve been shambling around for a few years now in a state of partial reanimation. Having lost drummer Faust to incarceration for murder and bassist Mortiis to, well, being Mortiis, founders Ihsahn and Samoth oversaw the release of a 2003 compilation, Scattered Ashes: A Decade of Emperial Wrath, then put together a live band for a series of festival appearances and European tourlets starting in 2005....

What does it mean to be a journalist? That’s a complicated question these days, but in Chicago for decades there’s been a rule of thumb. A journalist is the one who gets to push through the crowd at fires and crime scenes and cross the police line That means he’s the one who’s carrying a Chicago Police Department-issued press pass. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » We’ve also been turned away from mayoral news conferences, Board of Education meetings, and other newsworthy events where the CPD press pass is the key to admission....

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)....

One of the best local rap tracks that dropped last year was “Nino,” a tune that up-and-comer Young Giftz made with soul trap originator Tree; Giftz has an easygoing and playful flow that’s a great match for Tree’s grainy voice and wobbly, lean, and captivating production. It’s a hell of a song, and I wasn’t sure it could be improved upon until Giftz dropped a “Nino” remix yesterday—turns out all he had to do was make the song about twice as long and snag features from Save Money’s Joey Purp, Kami de Chukwu, Dally Auston, Brain Fresco, and Caleb James....

In this week’s paper I previewed tonight’s performances by the Joshua Redman Trio at City Winery; the sets support the very strong record the saxophonist released earlier this year, Trios Live (Nonesuch). As I noted in my piece, Redman has frequently embraced specific concepts or sounds in which to couch his music-making—a practice the live album eschews. One such project is the quartet James Farm—a group that also includes pianist Aaron Parks, bassist Matt Penman, and drummer Eric Harland, all bandleaders in their own right....

The fourth edition of the Chicago International Movies & Music Festival runs Thursday through Sunday, April 12 through 15, with screenings and live music at venues across the north side. Reviewing the opening-night film, Queens of Country, Ben Sachs writes, “This indie comedy tries a little too hard for cult status, trading in gags that are deliberately peculiar rather than funny. Set in a small Arizona town, it follows a line dancing champion (Lizzy Caplan) whose loutish fiance (Ron Livingston) likes to imitate John Wayne in The Conqueror during sex and whose best friend (Joe Lo Truglio) is, improbably, a pre-op transsexual....

AP Photo/Michael Conroy LeBron James playing in game four of the Eastern Conference finals last night LeBron James is a frightening athlete. I’ve never seen his like. Well, maybe Michael Jordan. But Jordan played in Chicago, and we saw enough of him to know his powers weren’t absolute. We hoped Jordan would lift the Bulls to victory in the games they absolutely had to win, and over his last six full seasons Jordan always did....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Yet another sports bar on Division, Fatpour Tap Works is every bit as good as you’d expect. Actually, if you share my generally low opinion of sports bars, it’s a little better than you’d expect. The main thing this place has going for it is a standout beer list: 50 taps and 100 more bottles and cans from breweries including Evil Twin, Jolly Pumpkin, Lost Abbey, and Mikkeller....

Once again, Savage Love is given over to letters from the readers who made the largest donations to campaigns to preserve marriage equality in California (noonprop8.com), protect same-sex couples in Florida (sayno2.com), and defeat Stephen Harper in Canada (better luck next time). I neglected to ask readers to send dough to the campaign against an anti-gay-marriage amendment in Arizona too, because I am a bad, bad man (it’s not too late—votenoprop102....

QMy boyfriend and I are in our mid-20s, love each other, and have been living together for two years. We have good sex once a week. I have a low libido, and I always have. But my sweet boyfriend needs more than once a week. Every once in a while, he brings up the fact that he’d like to have more sex. This conversation always goes the same way: he tells me, I start crying, he feels terrible for making me cry, we both wind up feeling like shit....

Dinosaur Jr | Beyond (Fat Possum) Dinosaur Jr Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The other reason Beyond is not Bug part II is that Lou Barlow’s songs are not posthardcore anthems of virginal rage; they sound like Bakesale outtakes. And they’re the album’s only real source of heat. Since burying a decades-old hatchet in late 2005, the band’s reissued their first three albums, made their reunion debut on late-night TV, logged sold-out tours, done the festivals, and issued collector’s edition Dinosaur Jr Nike Dunks....