Courtesy of Windish Agency Ryley Walker Local folk-music guitarist Ryley Walker is playing a free show at Cole’s tonight, Thu 12/4, with some other excellent local acts to benefit the Carrefour Collaborative. Walker has recently been performing and touring with an all-star lineup of backing musicians, comprised of some of the city’s best players, including drummer Frank Rosaly and bassist Anton Hatwich, but tonight he’s stripping things down. He’ll be playing in a duo with Ben Billington—the drummer from noisy free jazz outfit Tiger Hatchery and proggy Moonrises—and the duo will play an all-improvised set....

Last week US Air Guitar, the official association for people pretending to rock out, announced that the 2011 national finals for wannabe ax bros will take place July 23 at Metro. Air-guitar icon and author Björn Türoque, star of the documentary Air Guitar Nation, tells Gossip Wolf: “There’s an obvious joke about air guitar coming to the ‘Windy City,’ but we at US Air Guitar disdain the obvious joke. This is some serious shit going down in America’s heartland....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A few months ago I came across these attractively packaged sunflower seeds at H Mart. Apparently ripe for another oral fixation, I was snagged by the promise of “coconut flavor” and “selected large and plump full sunflower seeds from the natural Inner Mongolian environmental-friendly farm.” It wasn’t hype. These shells are fat, and snap open cleanly with a minimum of dental pressure....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 2 carrots, chopped2 c peas2 lbs coarsely ground lamb1 whole onion1 pinch white pepper1 pinch curry powder1 pinch “mixed spices” (see story)½ TBS. olive oil2 c long grain or basmati rice3 cloves garlic1 tbs chopped cilantro1 c waterpinch saffron (or turmeric)yogurt Wash rice in several changes of water, then cover with water and soak with saffron for 15 minutes....

A coffee shop where it’s possible to actually get some work done The exterior is so unassuming you could easily walk right past the new Pilsen coffee shop La Catrina Cafe—but inside it’s a different story. Owners Salvador and Diana Galicia have turned their double storefront on 18th Street into a welcoming, comfy-chic space furnished with tables handmade by Salvador and elegant upholstered chairs along the front window. On offer are Lavazza coffee, loose-leaf organic teas, and baked goods—croissants and scones, etc—from Pilsen’s Beurrage and Sweets by Shaun....

This year’s Pitchfork Music Festival saw a healthy amount of sun, a bit of sludge-punk, and handfuls of seapunks. The blowout boasted a broad lineup—the prospect of packing Wire, Lil B, Andy Stott, Pissed Jeans, and 42 other acts into Union Park for three straight days was impressive enough, and it largely worked out quite well. Sure, there was the occasional issue that put a damper on otherwise fantastic performances (the oncoming storm that cut Bjork’s glorious set short, the sound issues that plagued M....

QI feel ridiculous e-mailing you about this, but I figure that if anyone has seen or heard of all manner of asshole behavior during sex, it would be you. Very. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hell, JC, you did precisely what I would have urged you to do had I been in the room. Of course, the second-to-last thing a straight girl needs in the room with her when she’s losing her virginity to some asshole straight boy is a gay man twice her age desperately trying to get out....

The last time I wrote about Theater on the Lake, back in 2006, the place was alarmingly decrepit, but big things were about to happen. A new artistic director with lots of energy and ideas about how to engage audiences had just been hired, and plans had been drawn up for a $6 million makeover of the charming old open-air building on the beach at Fullerton. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I was nearby and saw one of the piglets come out and start wandering around–all on its own. Cherry was close by eating some ‘house slop’ that Crystal hadn’t finished. I think the piglet mistook Cherry for her mother and it went right up to Cherry. Now Cherry seems more and more like she’s ready to birth and getting a little cantankerous and she certainly didn’t want any little piglet eating some of that slop....

A first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “What I do is basically back up the teachers in the classroom by supporting the information they’re giving to students, but delivering it in a different paradigm. For instance, I might talk about the importance of reading, and tell the kids how there’s a picture from ancient Egypt of a person doing a magic trick called Cups and Balls....

PUNK | CSTVT’s unlikely route to Hot Topic “I’ve got this leather wallet; it’s the only wallet I’ve ever owned,” McEvilly says. “I bought it at Hot Topic when I was 11, and it’s still holding up—no big deal. Based on that experience, Hot Topic is OK with me, I guess.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » He and the film team worked down to the wire in advance of the Sundance screening in January (and the movie in theaters is further revised from the festival version)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The headliner is DJ Soulpusher, aka Frank Gossner (pictured, on the right), the guy behind the African-music blog Voodoo Funk. He recently returned from three years in West Africa, where he’d moved after his girlfriend landed a job in Guinea. Gossner was already a DJ specializing in funky 45s, and since he was feeling the urge to expand his musical horizons, Africa provided a perfect opportunity (though in the end he didn’t expand them all that much)....

In Chinese restaurants I always see statues of Buddha with long earlobes. I sometimes ask the folks who work there what significance this has. So far, even the Buddhists (three now) have no idea. Do you? —Eric Bottos, via e-mail Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Some basics. First, buddha is a title, not a name, similar to Christ, messiah, or saint; it means “awakened one” or “enlightened one....

LIZ PHAIR FUNSTYLE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Phair’s idea of “rapping” is not, say, Lil Wayne’s idea of rapping. Or, say, a rap fan’s idea of rapping. Or even, like, a generous Peaches fan’s idea of rapping. It’s more like that day in the late 80s or early 90s when your parents walked in on you watching The Box and attempted an imitation....

When David Protess—the hotshot professor who helmed the Innocence Project—got in trouble at Northwestern University, James Sotos saw an opportunity. Sotos is an attorney with a client and a message, and he believes that the more compromised Protess’s reputation, the better his chances of getting that message across. Simon is now serving a 37-year prison sentence. Sotos, his lawyer, says he’s innocent. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The release of Porter was a road-to-Damascus moment for Ryan and Illinois....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This morning’s Sun-Times reports that the Daley administration may have to pinkslip 1,000 city employees to try to make up for a huge budget deficit, though city officials still haven’t specified how large it is or where exactly the money’s short. Chicago Federation of Labor leader Dennis Gannon was predictably wary of the plan to slice the city payroll, saying layoffs in 1992 and 2002 had already pared the workforce down as far as it could go....

Part two of two. Read part one here. Jane Raley, an attorney at Northwestern University’s Center on Wrongful Convictions, was sitting at her desk on November 16, 2004, when she got the news she’d been waiting a year to hear—and that her client had been seeking for decades. The news came in the form of a phone call from Cellmark Diagnostics, a testing lab in North Carolina. When Raley heard what lab technicians had to say, she immediately broke down in tears....

How best to digest a good show? Try a scoop of fresh, creamy gelato and a walk by the lake after a visit to the Hyde Park Art Center. HPAC offers a variety of offbeat, interesting shows from respected locals like DePaul art professor Bibiana Suárez and poster artist Keith Herzik. The six-year-old, $3 million, Doug Garofalo-designed building is far more interesting than your average community center, and it’s located in a leafy corner of a condo-ized section of Hyde Park, steps from the #6 Jackson Park express bus, which runs between East Wacker and 79th....

Otter Creek Spring Cheddar ottercreekorganicfarm.com Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There are plenty of candidates for a title like this at the pungent, veiny, defiantly Old World end of the cheese spectrum, but I choose Otter Creek’s Spring Cheddar, which takes a style defined by supermarket mediocrity and reminds you just how much life, color, and personality it can have. It’s one of four seasonal cheddars that get their character from what the cows at this organic farm in Spring Green, Wisconsin, eat at different times of the year....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the last couple years obscure psychedelia from Brazil has become a touchstone for a new breed of psych-folk here in the US. Everyone knows the more pop-inclined mayhem of Os Mutantes, but I’m talking about the spacier stuff produced in the northeastern state of Pernambuco in the early 70s. Artists like Alceu Valenca and Geraldo Azevedo made some trippy records back then, but the cognoscenti has embraced the primal purr of people like Lulu Cortes & Ze Ramalho and Marconi Notaro, some of which has been reissued by the fine Portland, Maine imprint Time-Lag Records....