Seventeen years after their last album and several summers after front woman Hope Sandoval first became the unlikely fashion template for a vast number of female Urban Outfitters shoppers, psychedelic California swoon-rockers Mazzy Star have announced that their fourth LP is coming out in September. Seasons of the Day was recorded in Norway and California and features appearances by folk legend Bert Jansch and Colm Ó Cíosóig from My Bloody Valentine, another group that’s bigger now following their reunion than they ever were the first time around....

Blue Ocean With the street appeal of a low-lit neighborhood lounge, Blue Ocean is a middling sushi joint that aspires to be an excellent bar, promising a range of Asian-influenced beverages and dozens of sake selections. At the moment, Blue Ocean is BYOB, and some of the more desirable menu options seem to be appetizers and salads engineered to work well with drinks. The Ocean Sampler is finely ground fish, octopus, and crab clusters served on crispy fried rice wafers drizzled with citrus mayo....

Now, though, his political success depends on his being able to distance himself from left-wing conspiracy theorists and cast himself as a reasonable centrist. (Just do a Google search for “Obama and Jeremiah Wright” if you need to remind yourself of the right wing’s strategy to cast Obama as an H. Rap Brown wannabe.) He couldn’t do better than finding a mentor like Bishop Arthur Brazier, Apostolic’s retiring pastor. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I knew this would suck, but I had no idea it would suck so loudly. Will Ferrell, Paul Rudd, David Koechner, and Steve Carell return as the 70s TV newsmen from Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004), recruited this time around for a pioneering 24-hour cable network. The jokes are more weird than funny, and Ferrell and Carell, never the most subtle of performers, labor to put them across by bellowing, howling, and screeching; watching them work is like being locked in a broom closet full of Tourette’s victims....

You think south-side private investigator V.I. Warshawski, the heroine of Sara Paretsky’s mystery novels, is a tough cookie? Well, she’s modeled on her creator. In her new memoir, Writing in an Age of Silence (Verso), Paretsky recounts her isolated childhood as a Jewish girl in Lawrence, Kansas, the only daughter in a family of favored boys. Her life changed in the summer of 1966 when, as a 19-year-old camp counselor at Gage Park, she witnessed ugly riots and racial hatred; she went on to spend years as a “fat, ungainly, painfully lonely” grad student at the U....

QI am obsessed with my girlfriend sitting on my face, so I can eat her out while my nose penetrates her. It drives her crazy as well. I am wondering if you have heard of a dildo that could be mounted on my face, specifically on my nose, so that I penetrate her more deeply while she sits on my face and I lick her clit? Basically, I want her to be able to really ride my face while I lick her clit....

Norman sees dead people, and his gift has turned him into the most bullied kid at his school. But when his New England town comes under a witch’s curse, he’s the only person who can tangle with the netherworld. Produced by the Laika studio, this swell stop-motion animation operates on a wavelength similar to that of Laika’s debut feature, Coraline (2009), with assured character comedy counterbalanced by a solemn sense of macabre wonder....

Shawn Stucky, visual artist, is thinking about rereading: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The book is composed of a bunch of short stories, which for me makes for an easier read since I tend to get distracted easily. I enjoyed the crude and minimalist writing style of his stories. I was curious to analyze his approach to human existence as being gritty, lonely, and destructive....

Last Year at Marienbad ssss DIRECTED BY ALAIN RESNAIS WRITTEN BY ALAIN ROBBE-GRILLET WITH GIORGIO ALBERTAZZI, DELPHINE SEYRIG, AND SACHA PIToeFF Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I am now quite prepared to claim that Marienbad is the greatest film ever made, and to pity those who cannot see this,” proclaimed one French critic, even as others ridiculed what they perceived as the film’s pretentious solemnity—overlooking or missing its playful, if poker-faced, use of parody as well as its outright scariness....

The Hamburg Ballet makes its Chicago debut on an epic scale with Nijinsky, a two-and-a-half-hour work by the company’s artistic director, John Neumeier. A sixth-grade teacher cemented Neumeier’s obsession with incendiary dancer-choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky by scolding him for reading Anatole Bourman’s The Tragedy of Nijinsky. By 2000, when Nijinsky debuted, Neumeier says he’d amassed “hundreds of objects” for a collection dedicated to his idol: works of art, press clippings, even the menu from the great man’s wedding brunch, signed by him and his wife, Romola....

On the morning of May 17, aides to Mayor Rahm Emanuel leaked word that he was furious about the “blatant hypocrisy.” Out of the public view, though, Emanuel hasn’t been quite so turned off by the president’s enemies. In contrast, President Obama posts logs of White House visitors and updates them regularly. That means it’s easier to find out who Emanuel was meeting with in the White House when he was the president’s chief of staff than to see who visited him on the fifth floor of Chicago’s City Hall....

This Scandinavian improvising trio, led by reedist Mats Gustafsson, sets its originals next to tunes by free-jazz icons (Ornette Coleman, Yosuke Yamashita) and primal rock bands (the White Stripes, Lightning Bolt), but novelty isn’t the point. The repertoire choices seem guided solely by a hunger for intensity and beauty–occasionally an either/or proposition but more often mutually reinforcing. Driven hard by drummer Paal Nilssen-Love and bassist Ingebrigt Haaker Flaten and guided by a raw emotional intuition, the group carries the music to one extreme dynamic position after another, from demolitions-grade explosive power to featherlight nuance....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » No one has ever been charged as the perpetrator of the 1982 Tylenol murders in which seven Chicago-area residents died after consuming cyanide-laced Extra Strength Tylenol capsules. In a new self-published book, The Tylenol Mafia, author Scott Bartz says he knows why these crimes continue to confound investigators: authorities were steered toward an erroneous madman-in-the-drug-store theory of the crime....

Simplicity is one of the toughest tropes for a good musician to master. Good musicians tend to be, well, good, and in their writing and playing they often artfully complicate their music—with revelatory key changes, daring note choices, intriguing metrical shifts. Those who do without bells and whistles run the risk of slipping across the thin line that separates Zenlike focus from tediousness. Brilliant bands like the Modern Lovers and the Clean are distinguished from the packs of three-chord songwriters stalking open mikes only by an intangible spark of originality that’s pretty much impossible to develop on purpose....

Hippie alternaculture ate a friend of mine some years back. When I first knew her, she was to all appearances a competent, functional adult. She had a responsible job; she participated in a competitive sport with discipline and enthusiasm; she paid her bills. And then, in the space of a year or so, it all dissolved in a haze of vague spiritualism and patchouli. She ditched the job to be a bike messenger and ditched all the rest of it to smoke pot and pursue her inner puddle of bliss....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tonight at 8 PM, the Whistler (2421 N. Milwaukee) offers up Mise En Place – Snap Shots: the second installment of the Pavement Theater Group‘s performance series. Gather ’round and listen to short plays from past, present, and future Pavement members, including Gregory S. Moss’s Youth; Mallery Avidon’s Why I Don’t Want to Go to Yoga Class With You — A Lecture; Joshua Conkel’s A Super Shiny Precious Thing; and A Clavicle by Artistic Director David Perez....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On Gipsy Manifesto, due October 29 from Piranha, the Boban and Marko Markovic Orchestra, that most celebrated of Balkan brass combos, continues an inexorable march toward a more global, contemporary sound. Boban’s son and fellow trumpeter, Marko, joined the band a dozen years ago, when he was just 13, and since then he’s clearly been groomed to inherit control of the Macedonian juggernaut, with the group increasingly broadening its sound for contemporary dance floors....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » With mid-November approaching, now’s around the time when I start thinking about what I’d pick as my favorite albums of the year. That means one of two things typically happens: I’ll spend some time listening to albums I otherwise missed this past year, or I’ll revisit some of my favorites and realize which ones truly stand out. Of the former, easily the biggest revelation is These New Puritans’ Field of Reeds, which I’m glad I only got to now, since it feels much more appropriate for the gloomier late-fall, early-winter days than it does for early summer, when it was released....

Shawn Convey One of the bikers of Wild Shawn Convey is a Chicago-based photographer currently at work on two documentary films. The first, now in postproduction, is a still-untitled portrait of Kolkata Sanved, a human rights organization in India that uses dance-movement therapy to rehabilitate child victims of human trafficking. The second, which has the working title Wild, depicts a motorcycle club in Herzegovina that’s created a sanctuary for a few hundred wild horses....

Just a few weeks from giving birth, Crystal sprawled in southern Wisconsin quack grass, her swollen nipples exposed to the April chill. Cong ambled over and kissed her on the face. Derrickson and Kessenich, former Madison restaurateurs, have been raising rare-breed cattle, sheep, goats, and chickens for more than 12 years. But these are the first pigs Kessenich has ever bred and the first for Derrickson since her youth. The couple has two other mulefoots aside from Cong and Crystal–another male, named Churchill, and another gilt, or female that has yet to give birth, called Cherry....