Our 11 picks for concerts Fake Shore Drive showcase with Mannie Fresh, Lucki Ecks, ZMoney, and Giftz Kranky Records celebrates 20 years Giuseppe Verdi isn’t around to celebrate his 200th birthday this fall, but that won’t stop us. Lyric Opera opens its season with Otello on Sat 10/5 (with seven more performances through Sat 11/2), Chicago Opera Theater performs Joan of Arc at the Harris Theater (four shows between Sat 9/21 and Sun 9/29), and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of Riccardo Muti, has put together a Verdi festival that includes a Thu 10/10 performance of the Requiem (coinciding with the composer’s actual birthday) that will be simulcast on the fancy new LED screen in Millennium Park....

I know this is not the most groundbreaking observation, but for a culturally engaged human living in an urban area, it is advisable to have a calendar of free or cheap regular events. That way, when friends or family come to visit, you can suddenly look like the culturally engaged urban-dwelling human you aspire to be, instead of the vaguely sad-feeling, Netflix-bingeing worm that you really are. Anyway, I have a new thing to add to the roster, and you should think of doing this instead of queuing up Orange Is the New Black....

Ponytail are so distinctive that any attempt to describe what they sound like winds up coming off like a half insult. For instance, you might want to say that singer Molly Siegel sounds like both a cat and a dog, or that Ken Seeno and Dustin Wong’s guitar parts are like a hybrid of riffs from Yes’s Fragile and Led Zeppelin II with extreme finger-tapping tossed in–except, you know, more punk....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The woman who wrote the book on the woman who wrote the book on food is this weekend’s Chicago Foodways Roundtable speaker. Local author Joan Reardon, who wrote Poet of the Appetites, the biography of M.F.K. Fisher, speaks on Fisher at Kendall College on Saturday, May 12, at 10 AM. Not only did Reardon spend almost 15 years working on the Fisher biography, she also wrote the introduction to the 50th anniversary edition of Fisher’s The Art of Eating, authored M....

Millennium Park’s Cloud Gate is irresistible to the hand and eye. We crouch beneath it and play in front of it. We stroke it. We take photos of our warped, stretched bodies reflected in its curved chrome surface. Or we simply stand and watch the sky change in it. As Trevor drew, Ryan explained. Their tripod apparatus, which they call “the easel,” in a sense allowed Trevor to see through the paper he drew on to the object beyond it being drawn....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I saw the world premiere of this audacious, undeniably challenging, in fact downright mind-boggling avant-garde masterpiece by Indonesian filmmaker Garin Nugroho at the Venice International Film Festival in 2006, along with my esteemed colleague and friend Olaf Möller, a critic based in Cologne who writes columns for both Film Comment and Cinema Scope. (I’m sorry to say that Olaf’s review of the film for the former isn’t available online, but he aptly called it an “honest-to-God masterpiece of mad invention....

friday16 cbaby teeth On the cover of Baby Teeth’s second full-length, The Simp (Lujo), bassist Jim Cooper is moping in a jacket and tie at the California Clipper’s handsome bar, looking like he just failed the audition for Bryan Ferry’s spot in Roxy Music, and from the first track to the last the band splurges like a soused middle manager on an expense account, indulging in almost every kind of flourish you can cram into a pop record–itchy disco strings, bursts of sunny a cappella harmonies, wicked hair-metal guitar solos, even a slide-whistle-and-slapstick vaudeville breakdown....

Carl F. Hammer, owner of Carl Hammer Gallery, raves over: Simon Boccanegra at Lyric Opera of Chicago I recently attended Giuseppe Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra. It epitomized what an opera performance, for me, should be. Packed with political, romantic, and familial intrigue, the story combined the magic of beautiful Verdi arias with a spectacular selection of voices (cast). The very moving story, while abundantly tragic, was about the realization of the beauty of forgiveness and the resulting unification of a great nation (Italy) personified through the individual character roles played within the narrative....

The dancey electro-pop of Walter Meego (the alter ego of locals Justin Sconza and Colin Yarck) is slicker than anything you’d expect this dirty city to produce. The hooky “OneFive,” a Junior Boys-esque tune from the duo’s self-titled 2005 EP, rides a groove so slithery you’d swear it was made with a synthesizer that converts Bryan Ferry’s pants into sound. The follow-up single, “Usually,” marries Umbrellas of Cherbourg strings to a dub-step beat, and the subsequent “Hollywood” 12-inch is gauzy, glittery disco with moves like a Solid Gold dancer....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the latest Three Beats, I wrote about the upcoming A John Cage Festival organized and curated by composer Nomi Epstein (who also leads the terrific experimental-music collective Aperiodic) to celebrate the centennial of Cage’s birth. I interviewed her for the piece, but I thought her answers were interesting and illuminating enough to stand on their own—so below is the complete conversation....

LIT Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A cozy, low-ceilinged warren of subterranean brick-walled rooms, 57th Street offers probably the most ecumenical selection of any independent bookstore in the city. Literary best sellers, mysteries, cookbooks, social science tomes, children’s books, and African-American history are all given equal weight—and there’s a fantastic selection of periodicals and frequent author appearances to boot. Factor in the sibling Seminary Co-op Bookstore, a labyrinthine maze of classics, contemporary literature, and more than 100,000 scholarly books three blocks away in the basement of the Chicago Theological Seminary, and it’s no wonder no one in Hyde Park ever leaves Hyde Park....

For 35 years a pair of life-size giraffes guarded the entrance to Elaine Place off of Roscoe. They were made from steel car bumpers welded together by Chicago artist John Kearney, and they were easily the most charming things on a charming street. At Christmas time, residents of the Elaine Place Apartments would drape giant wreaths around their necks. In 1999 they were joined by a goat, also made by Kearney, installed at the other end of the block, on Cornelia....

Jason Segel is the ideal rom-com star for women who find Woody Allen too macho. In movies like Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Bad Teacher, and now The Five-Year Engagement, Segel plays the sort of sensitive, considerate, moony, doughy everyman that most American women end up with (if they’re lucky). For the guys dragged along to see these movies, there’s the implicit promise that being sensitive and considerate (if not moony or doughy) will score you a babe like Mila Kunis, Cameron Diaz, or Emily Blunt, respectively....

Lots of people undoubtedly still picture a thuggish black dude in diamond-encrusted chains when they hear the word “rapper,” but over the past decade the face of rap has changed radically, and the public’s expectations are changing with it: witness the recent mainstream popularity of Asher Roth (a white-bread college kid) and Nicki Minaj (an aggressively eccentric young black woman with a serious postmodernist streak). But is rap ready for a black, bisexual video-game geek who’s into indie rock?...

OK, the name is a dud, but you can’t not like the big, sunny idea behind the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s new Citizen Musician initiative. It aims to make the world a better place by taking live music everywhere. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At an event at the Cultural Center that afternoon, CSO president Deborah Rutter credited music director Riccardo Muti as the driving force behind the project....

Pat Ivansek, improv performer, satiates his unwavering hunger for The Twilight Zone with episodes of: Night Gallery If you’re like me, you grew up obsessed with the original Twilight Zone, each episode a completely different story, with the inevitable plot twist and Rod Serling’s slick voice-over, all in glorious black-and-white. Recently I’ve started watching Night Gallery, Serling’s follow-up series, which ran beginning ten years later later, from 1969 to ’73 (it’s streaming for free on Hulu)....

I don’t have a habit of expressing gratitude for European colonialism, but I would like to thank the Portuguese for Fat Rice, the compact and currently booming new spot from the former underground dining team known as X-Marx. Like the arroz gordo, the casseroles at the bottom of the menu are generous, stocked with a variety of plants and animals, and are impossible not to share. There’s the heaping bowl of catfish, tofu, Thai eggplant, and pork belly marinated in a powerfully funky shrimp paste that mellows with cooking but deepens in flavor—and balances the sweet-sour influence of tamarind....

Tonight Fake Shore Drive hosts a listening party for Alternative Trap, the debut mixtape from local rapper Lucki Ecks, and it’s taken him by surprise. He’s only released a handful of songs, but the response has been strong enough it’s sometimes overwhelmed the 17-year-old MC. “Being a rapper with a buzz, people wanna talk about you, so I just get kinda shy, I don’t wanna talk about it at all,” he says....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mag Mile businesses want people to spend the extra day this year shopping; to this end they’re offering champagne-themed Leap Day specials and samples including champagne kisses at the Hershey’s Store and a free glass of champagne for shoppers at Marlowe on Friday. The Swissotel Chicago is pairing champagne with items on an a la carte menu such as beef tenderloin with vanilla cream sauce, lobster canapes, and chocolate-dipped strawberries; Angela Roman of the John Hancock Center’s Signature Room at the 95th will give a lecture on champagne at 5 PM....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In his elegiaic meditation in Thursday’s New York Times on Scooter Libby and the White House he served, David Brooks, a conservative, showed he’d like to think the best of both of them. He managed that with Libby — “You can convince me that Libby is guilty, but I’ll always believe he’s a good man.” The White House was a harder nut to crack, and the best Brooks could do was try to mitigate its behavior by recalling its upbringing: “When you think back to the White House of 2003, the period the trial explores, you will discover a White House consumed by a feverish sense of mission....