QI’m 19, female, bisexual, and have been with the same guy for a year and things are great. I came home for Christmas and he went to his parents’ house, and I’ll see him in a few weeks. For Christmas, my mom got me some typical “mom” gifts—socks and underwear—but the panties had Disney princesses on them. I feel like a pedophile just owning them! I get it: she doesn’t like the idea that I might be having sex, especially with the alarming rate that babies are popping out of teenage girls—but come on....

sharp darts Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Joy has inhabited a number of music scenes over the past decade or so—he cut his teeth spinning records at underground raves as a teen in Minneapolis before moving on to clubs in Providence, Boston, and now Chicago—and all of them have influenced his style as a DJ and producer. “At this point a lot of DJs would look at you crazy if you said, ‘I’m a something DJ,’” Joy says....

See our reviews and live coverage of the bands playing on: Friday · Saturday · Afterparties Pitchfork main » Venerated juke producer DJ Rashad plays the dreaded 1 PM slot, when the gates have just opened and the weather always seems to be either blazing heat or pouring rain—I don’t imagine most festival attendees will have made it to the stage of their choice by 1 PM, or imbibed enough to start dancing to a mix of juke, ghettotech, and house....

Timothy J. Duncan, exhibits manager at Loyola University Museum of Art, is actually pretty conflicted about: New lakefront sculptures I commute to work on the lakefront bike path each morning. I enjoy the time regarding the trees, the lake and most especially the birds. I ignore the traffic on Lake Shore Drive, pretending the park and lake are an isolated natural sanctuary. But recently there are new objects to look at in the park, and not ones made by Mother Nature....

Five Easy Pieces This week Chicago moviegoers are serendipitously treated to a trio of notable works by New Hollywood directors. The Northbook Public Library has Francis Ford Coppola’s The Cotton Club, a successful rehashing of the themes he explored in his Godfather films; Philip Kaufman’s adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff screens at the Gene Siskel Film Center; and Roman Polanski’s famous Chinatown will be on the TVs at Delilah’s....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’d be doing my 24-year-old self a great disservice if I neglected to write about, or at least make note of, the recent release of Modern Life Is War’s Fever Hunting, the influential midwest hardcore band’s return following a four-and-a-half year disbandment. Their flagship album, Witness, was released in 2005, setting the bar for earnest hardcore, both tough and nostalgic by nature, with melodic breakdowns and front man Jeffrey Eaton going red in the face with screams that sounded as sincere as they did guttural....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » According to the post at Fake Shore Drive where I discovered “Chill the Fuck Out,” WWNNN is a duo made up of Sin and Mic Vittorio, and according to the credits the song features Hollow and Lavish Mzck. I don’t know anything about any of these people except that Sin is 19 years old and has a Tumblr called Room Full of Dope Shit, which is a really great name for a Tumblr; that’s where I found out that their name is supposed to stand for “We Winnin’,” which I probably would’ve never ever figured out on my own....

Three and a half years ago two New Orleans bartenders, Maksym Pazuniak and Kirk Estopinal (formerly of the Violet Hour), published a slim volume and accompanying blog titled Rogue Cocktails, for which they asked their colleagues—many of them working in Chicago—to contribute “unusual and exciting recipes that hopefully broke at least some of the rules of cocktail construction.” Later retitled Beta Cocktails (due to the objections of Oregon’s Rogue Brewery), it featured audacious potables such as the Angostura Sour, featuring a full ounce and a half of bitters, and the Lavender Cadaver, an eggy flip with peaty Islay Scotch and watermelon....

At first glance, the letter from CircEsteem looked like a bad joke. “Greetings!” it read. “After much deliberation and due diligence, the Board of Directors of CircEsteem has terminated Paul Miller’s employment as of June 22, 2009.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » According to the complaint, Miller started offering workshops under the CircEsteem name in 2001, and the next year formed a for-profit corporation called Pro Clown Productions, which developed programs for CircEsteem....

I first met local rapper Alex Wiley at the end of 2011 while working on a story about Kembe X, one of his good friends and musical collaborators. I didn’t know much about Wiley beyond his guest spot on Kembe’s Self Rule mixtape, though his performance on “Don’t Quit (Smoking And Shit)” gave me some insight into his personality; Wiley’s effortless, playful, quicksilver rapping gave me an inkling that the dude had a goofy and mischievous streak....

Conventional songwriting isn’t really Marnie Stern‘s thing. Though her new record, The Chronicles of Marnia (Kill Rock Stars), is packed with beautiful melodies and sticky hooks, they’re not exactly spread out on a platter for you. Instead they’re woven into odd arrangements built from dense layers of finger-tapped guitar and heavily multi­tracked vocals. Stern has recorded with fiercely talented and equally idiosyncratic drummers—first Zach Hill (Hella, Death Grips) and now Kid Millions (Oneida)—and built her songs on their obtuse rhythmic foundations, giving her dreamy experimental indie-pop an excitingly weird and pushy feel....

Presented by the Old Town School of Folk Music, the 13th annual Chicago Folk & Roots Festival features several stages of folk, blues, soul, bluegrass, Cajun, funk, and world music in Welles Park (4400 N. Lincoln) from noon till 10 PM on Sat 7/10 and Sun 7/11. The eclectic main-stage bookings include the Budos Band, Shemekia Copeland, and the Occidental Brothers Dance Band International featuring Samba Mapangala on Saturday and Etran Finatawa, HK & Les Saltimbanks, and Red Baraat on Sunday....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For Chicagoans anyway, this has been an exceptional year for Iranian movies, given the extended run of Asghar Faradi’s A Separation (the first Iranian film to win an Academy Award), the local premieres of Jafar Panahi’s heroic This Is Not a Film (which screens again at Doc Films on the 27th) and Rafi Pitts’s The Hunter, and the above-average selections (The Last Step and the personal essay My Home, which plays later this month) in the Film Center’s annual Iranian series....

These two excellent programs collect short puppet animations by Stephen and Timothy Quay, identical twins from Pennsylvania who studied at Britain’s Royal College of Art in the late 60s. They were heavily influenced by Czech animators like Jan Svankmajer and the Russian pioneer Wladyslaw Starewicz (who used animal and insect remains as materials), but their cryptic, mostly black-and-white films are more musical and surreal, discarding narrative for a nightmare world of fine-art references, destabilized perspectives, and animated objects that mock the human form....

Several readers have written to complain that I have a bias against rich bankers. Besides, I think the bankers did us a favor by blowing to smithereens some of the central tenets of the so-called school reform movement. It looks like the bankers have demonstrated you can get something for nothing. Then again, these banks have doled out millions of dollars in campaign contributions over the years, including tens of thousands of dollars to Emanuel’s campaign funds....

Winning a best-song Oscar–for “Al Otra Lado del Rio,” from The Motorcycle Diaries, in 2005–doesn’t seem to have convinced this Uruguayan pop singer and songwriter that he ought to start playing to a bigger crowd. The terrific new 12 Segundos de Oscuridad (Warner Latina) retains all the hooky intimacy of its predecessors: Drexler’s sweet voice rarely rises above a conversational volume, as if he’s relating his tales of failed love and fervent desire from across a kitchen table....

Lollapalooza’s officially sanctioned afterparties (and a few preparties on Wednesday and Thursday) give fans unwilling to brave the festival’s heat and crowds or unable to score a ticket opportunities to see some of its standout acts; for festival attendees with a high tolerance for exhaustion, the shows provide the chance to watch live music almost around the clock. The events take place at a wide range of venues, not only in terms of size and atmosphere but also in terms of location—Thievery Corporation vocalist LouLou is doing an afterfest DJ set at a club inside the Horseshoe Casino in Hammond, Indiana....

Reeling: The Chicago LGBT International Film Festival runs Friday through Thursday, November 8 through 14, at Chicago Filmmakers, 5243 N. Clark; Logan, 2646 N. Milwaukee; Music Box, 3733 N. Southport; Northwestern Univ. Block Museum of Art, 40 Arts Circle Dr., Evanston; and smaller venues around town. Unless otherwise noted, tickets are $12; passes are $50 (five screenings), $80 (ten screenings), $125 (all screenings excluding special events), and $175 (all screenings and events)....

Alfonso “Piloto” Nieves was at a friend’s birthday party—still going strong at almost 4 AM the day before Christmas Eve—when he got a call on his cell from Omar Magaña. Magaña owned the Little Village building where Nieves, an award-winning sculptor, rented a studio in the attic. He told Nieves the building was on fire. Since most of his real family is in Mexico, that meant a lot to Nieves....

If you’re still inclined to believe anything Mayor Rahm Emanuel says about, well, anything, let me remind you that it’s been almost two years since he announced he had reformed the much-maligned tax increment financing program. Having spent two years running Chicago, Mayor Emanuel has apparently come to the conclusion that the area around McCormick place is among the poorest of the poor, and that a basketball arena for a private university charging more than $30,000 a year in tuition is at the top of the list of things this city really, really needs....