Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If you’re not the type of person with a half dozen or so electro/blog-house sites in your RSS feed, you might not know about Ladyhawke (not to be confused with Ladyhawk), but she’s the hot new business with the shutter-shades kids. Her regular stuff is OK, if a little samey, but the Canyons remix of her track “Dusk to Dawn” is a nasty blend of disco and harshed-out garage rock that no one else is messing with right now....

Stopping in only six cities, the MirmanHodgmanSchaal Sandwich-to-Go Tour smacks of a “party at the moon tower” moment—a few comedian friends deciding that hitting the road together, if only for a week, sounds like a damn good time. Better for us. The collective TV resumé of these three indie comics—none so popular that their out-there cred is compromised—reads like a list of recommendations on a particularly in-the-know Netflix account: Eugene Mirman and Kristen Schaal had recurring roles on the incredible Flight of the Conchords and currently provide voices on the animated cult favorite Bob’s Burgers....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Except for a misbegotten movie that conflated it with the Fatty Arbuckle scandal, The Wild Party was forgotten until Spiegelman’s version came out in 1994. Six years later, not one but two musical adaptations premiered in the same season: Andrew Lippa’s at the Manhattan Theatre Club (February) and Michael John LaChiusa and George C. Wolfe’s on Broadway (April). The obvious next step would be to dig out whatever else March wrote that might be worth reviving, and Silent Theatre Company has taken it, staging March’s follow-up to The Wild Party, The Set-Up....

In the past few years, nothing has dominated indie music like nostalgia. Band after 90s band has reunited, providing a key draw at festivals from Pitchfork to Coachella to Taste of Randolph Street and kindling memories of the inglorious glory days of 1993, when a major-label signing frenzy briefly turned the underground into the mainstream—and this time around, even the also-rans of the alt-rock boom can hope to cash in. Back in that era Superchunk helped define and popularize indie rock as we now know it, and like many of their peers—Pavement, Polvo, any group that put out a seven-inch on Teenbeat in 1995—they’re back in action....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The beef du jour is between Rhymefest–the local MC who’s either underrated or overrated depending on who you ask–and Fader-approved Harlem hipster rapper Charles Hamilton. Yesterday FSD posted Fest’s dis track “Supersonic (Chucky Cheese),” where he runs through a laundry list of complaints about Hamilton’s skills, fashion sense, and credibility over a tweak of JJ Fad’s “Supersonic.” (The title and artwork both refer to Sonic the Hedgehog, who’s something like a spirit animal to Hamilton....

In the course of a year the Reader‘s restaurant critics eat many things we end up wishing we hadn’t—we do it so you don’t have to. Of course we eat a lot of very good things too, and of those a few are so wonderful they change our perspective on food and what it means to us. It’s those rare bites that make the added pounds, occupational indigestion, and occasional bout of food poisoning worth it....

The Reader’s Choice: Gordon Gill Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Gill, 45, specializes in environmentally sustainable large-scale buildings. His designs have a machine-like aesthetic, looking—and functioning—as much like devices as buildings. While an associate partner at the Chicago office of architectural powerhouse Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Gill led the design of China’s Pearl River Tower, a 71-story building (set for completion next year) that harnesses wind and sun to produce as much energy as it uses....

Jubilee Furniture Co. 610 E. North, Carol Stream 630-337-1467 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If you’re an avid thrifter you might find a few things not to like about Jubilee Furniture: There are no color-coded racks of clothing. There’s not much in the way of housewares. This is not the kind of thrift store where you’ll stumble across an eight-track copy of Scott Baio’s self-titled debut album or other pieces of ironic nostalgia....

Chicago Daily News Archive memory.loc.gov/ammem/ndlpcoop/ichihtml/cdnhome.html Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Just about everyone and everything photographed by the Daily News between 1902 and 1933 (the afternoon daily published from 1876 to 1978) is now searchable online: more than 55,000 vivid pictures scanned from the newspaper’s glass-plate negatives. The originals are housed at the Chicago History Museum, but the rather utilitarian site is maintained by the Library of Congress....

Fifty years ago this spring, the white Texas writer John Howard Griffin became a national celebrity. Sepia, a prominent black magazine, published his “Journey Into Shame,” a series of articles about his daring travels through the Deep South. At midnight on November 7, 1959, after using pills, a sunlamp, and dye to darken his skin, Griffin had stepped out into the streets of New Orleans as a Negro to see what he would see....

Time asked an interesting question on last week’s cover: “What if there’s no hell?” Was this supposed to be one more thing to worry about? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As it happens, I’d just finished reading a book that grapples with the idea there’s neither hell nor heaven nor even God. Obviously, this isn’t a new idea, and Douthat wasn’t making an empirical case for hell, simply observing that a sophisticated set of metaphysical suppositions should find a place for it....

An as-told-to interview with a Chicago publishing whiz, for our Spring Books issue. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I think ’99 was when we did the Fahey book How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life, but Royal Trux guitarist and singer Neil Hagerty‘s book Victory Chimp came out in ’96 or ’97. That was actually the first attempt at publishing. Victory Chimp was a spur off of Twin Infinitives—one of the early Drag City records and one of our favorites, even to this day....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You know, I keep waiting for an engaging takedown of Obama as Chicago politician–something comprehensive and well-researched yet clear and easy for the political novice to understand–and this ain’t it. And I can’t figure out whether it goes to prove Obama’s point, that for all the questionable-to-outright-offensive alliances he’s made he’s played it so he’s not “entangled” in any way that’s really going to hurt him, or just whether no one’s gone for the throat yet....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Today marks the 80th birthday of Martin Luther King Jr., and as in years past, most celebrations of his legacy are bound to dwell on his victories bringing change to the Jim Crow south. But Northwestern University’s Block Films takes a different tack tonight by exploring one of King’s most notable defeats. Seth McClellan’s documentary King in Chicago: The Chicago Freedom Movement, screening at 6:30 PM at the Block Museum of Art with the director in attendance, revisits the civil rights leader’s frustrating, ultimately unsuccessful 1966 attempt to eradicate housing discrimination in Chicago, where he was brushed back by white rage and smoothly outflanked by Mayor Richard J....

After former Chicago police commander Jon Burge was jailed last year for lying about torturing suspects, the Chicago Torture Justice Memorials Project put out a call inviting proposals for a “speculative memorial” to honor his victims. Members of perpetually under-the-radar performance collective Lucky Pierre answered that call. They spent the summer writing scenarios, or “actions,” most of which are unlikely ever to get acted on. “Action 25,” for example, requires that you “be a black man” and “commit aggravated assault, official misconduct, perjury, obstruction of justice, conspiracy, compelling a confession by force, and intimidation....

Around the time the last Page France record, Hello Dear Wind, came out, bandleader Michael Nau kept complaining to interviewers about getting pegged as a Christian artist just because of some religious imagery in his lyrics that he wasn’t even aware of. It’s weird how a little imagery can give people the wrong idea about you like that, especially when you also write songs explicitly about Jesus, tour with Christian bands, and talk up all the other Christian acts you love....

It’s a three-hour drive to the Quad Cities from Chicago, and by the time you get there you’re deep in darkest Wal-Mart Land and the radio is swamped with lite country and Christian rock. Rock Island, Illinois, doesn’t seem like a prime destination for a band starting the promo push for their first album on Matador, but it’s where the Ponys are headed. They’re one of about 90 acts–locals like the M’s, Bound Stems, and the Changes as well as bigger names like Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Sunset Rubdown, and the Cold War Kids–that have stopped here over the past year to play not for the presumably show-starved indie kids of Rock Island but for two guys upstairs from a pizza place....

Silk Road Rising cofounder Jamil Khoury says the uproar over Manhattan’s Ground Zero mosque inspired both his new play in progress, “Mosque Alert,” and his attempt to crowdsource the playwriting process via a Web page. It has also produced a library of videos that includes a brief biography for each of the six characters, along with individual riffs—developed in collaboration with the actors—on topics such as “family drama” and “being an American....

On New Year’s Eve 2003 Barry Callebaut, the world’s largest chocolate manufacturer, finished closing the old Brach’s candy factory in Austin, throwing the last of its 3,500 employees out of work. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Barry Callebaut’s Christmas present comes from the Chicago-Kingsbury TIF, which was created on April 12, 2000, largely to subsidize the restoration of the Montgomery Ward building and the redevelopment of the surrounding land....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Except that most of that wasn’t really true. Yes, Sodikoff was having the word “deli” scraped off the glass, and he now refers to the place as “a deli-inspired American brasserie,” the kind of combination that would sound wishy-washy coming from most restaurateurs but is par for the course for Sodikoff, who remixes dining genres the way Quentin Tarantino mashes up spaghetti westerns and kung fu movies....