Thursday5 Druid PerfumeNight GalleryPhosphorescentA Woman Beyond Time: Mary Lou Williams at 100 Friday6 J. ColeNight Gallery Sunday8 Gary Allan Monday9 Cephalic Carnage, Decrepit BirthVictoire Tuesday10 Gaida Wednesday4 Ken CamdenGaidaVox Arcana NIGHT GALLERY Half-local duo Night Gallery (aka Aaron David Ross of Gatekeeper, who recently left for Brooklyn, and Adam Griffin of Golden Birthday) say they met at a starry-night outdoor screening of The Neverending Story, and if that isn’t the perfect way to start a questionably sincere New Romantic band then my name ain’t Atreyu....

thursday31 Able Baker Fox, Felix Culpa Beat Kitchen, 9 PM Flosstradamus, Million Dollar Mano The Underground, 9 PM cHOT WATER MUSIC Hot Water Music tattoos are probably one of the most popular band-related body mods in America, up there with the Black Flag bars, the little Pearl Jam guy, and anything to do with the Grateful Dead. HWM have a really well-designed logo, which is surely part of it. But more important they’re still the reigning kings of melodic, emotional hardcore—even though they officially disbanded almost two years ago—and melodic, emotional hardcore is just the sort of music to make you feel like doing something sentimental and irreversible....

Once you start looking, you see them everywhere. There are empty storefronts on Irving Park Road in Portage Park, on Commercial Avenue in South Chicago, on Division Street in Austin, even on Clark Street in Lincoln Park. Still more striking are the empty lots dotting the landscape—the city alone owns more than 15,000, in each neighborhood on every side of town. That doesn’t include thousands more in private hands. This is what it’s come down to in the 18th Ward: a choice between a pawnshop or a long-empty lot....

For some reason my apartment’s been a hotbed of mad retarded music-related googling in the past few days. Possibly its peak—or nadir, depending on your perspective—came the other night when I stumbled upon a treasure trove of vintage TV show theme songs. (The inspiration to search for it came in part from the Onion’s recent 22 TV Opening-Credit Sequences that Fit Their Show Perfectly feature.) While some of the theme songs are notable mostly for nostalgia purposes (Alf has a remarkably egregious amount of slap bass that puts even the most slap-bass-happy songs on the list to shame) some of them honestly beat ass....

From Louis Malle’s Calcutta (1969), which screened last night at Doc Films Watching Louis Malle’s Calcutta last night at Doc Films, I thought that someone could organize a neat repertory series of documentaries by narrative filmmakers. The selections might include Michelangelo Antonioni’s Chung Kuo China, Luis Buñuel’s Land Without Bread, Sergei Eisenstein’s Que Viva Mexico!, Jean-Luc Godard’s Ici et Ailleurs, any number of shorts by Werner Herzog (La Soufrière, God’s Angry Man, etc), Shohei Imamura’s A Man Vanishes (which screens again on Thursday night at the Siskel Center, incidentally), Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up and ABC Africa, Spike Lee’s 4 Little Girls, Roberto Rossellini’s India: Matri Bhumi, Agnès Varda’s The Gleaners & I, or Orson Welles’s F for Fake....

In my 12 O’Clock Track pick last week I briefly mentioned the DJ, producer, and blogger Boima Tucker. Coincidentally, my pick this week comes from Matt Shadetek, whose similar interest in dance-music styles being produced outside of first-world club culture has led to a number of team-ups with Tucker, who’s contributed to Shadetek’s cultishly adored blog Dutty Artz. In March his Dutty Artz label will release The Empire Never Ended, which Shadetek claims will highlight his hip-hop roots, and which will feature guest turns by neoreggae artist Jahdan Blakkamoore and postmodern Internet superstar Riff Raff....

Something rare is happening onstage now at Rivendell Theatre Ensemble’s new Edgewater space: two girls are talking about their lives—and what they’re saying has damn little to do with boys. Or vampires. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Laney has two strikes against her going into her new high school. She has dystonia, a neuromuscular condition that’s left her with a crooked back, and she’s an atheist in a part of the country where “Have you found a church yet?...

You might figure that every single neighborhood in the city has already thrown its own street festival this summer, but the South Loop is about to prove you wrong—the seventh annual Bash on Wabash is Sat 9/4 and Sun 9/5 (11 AM-10 PM) on Wabash between 13th and 14th. On Saturday the South Stage features mostly cover and tribute bands like Sixteen Candles, Rod Tuffcurls & the Bench Press, and Secondhand Smoke, while the North Stage caters more directly to folks looking to do a little ass shakin’ with a club-friendly lineup that includes local dance-party heroes Flosstradamus, 18-year-old Tampa MC Dominique Young Unique, and the Hood Internet....

I begin with a disclaimer: I do not know where to find the best mariscos in the city. I only know that there’s one corner in Chicago with two west Mexican mariscos places competing like hookers in the red-light district. On the east side of Ashland there’s the flashier of the two, El Barco, the crazy one, Laura San Giacomo if we’re talking Pretty Woman. Its menu has a section called “chingaderias,” which translates roughly to “fuckeries” (but apparently in a good way)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » James Warren – the same James Warren who donates his time to a billionaire’s media venture which skims substantial bits of other people’s content in order to supplant them as a go-to news homepage – broke the news. Regarding “technology/service to track content on the Web and to extract payments from third-parties and ad networks that have appropriated newspaper content,” he writes:...

Patrick Wang’s moving debut feature appropriates the story arc of a courtroom drama, but the law turns out to be less pivotal than such old-fashioned ideas as fairness and decency. Joey (Wang), an interior designer in a small Tennessee town, reels after his lover, Cody (Trevor St. John), is killed in a car accident. His greatest solace is six-year-old Chip, the boy he and Cody were raising together, but Joey discovers to his shock that Cody’s will assigns custody of the boy to Cody’s sister, Betsy (Lisa Altomare)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » My former boss, Illinois Times president Fletcher “Bud” Farrar, writes an appreciation of the last Democratic governor before Rod Blagojevich: Dan Walker (1973-1977), the Montgomery Ward executive whose report on the 1968 Democratic Convention demonstrations described them as a “police riot” and who in 1972 shed his corporate togs, donned a red bandana, and walked the state on an anti-Daley platform to upset Paul Simon for the Democratic guernatorial nomination in 1972....

HER NAME WAS MARGO. She was a 22-year-old addict hooking for her heroin, and when Nelson Algren met her, in the mid-40s in Chicago, while he was working on The Man With the Golden Arm, he violated the immortal principles he’d set down in A Walk on the Wild Side: “Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom’s. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own....

NAM Y HUH/AP PHOTOS Then-U.S. Senate hopeful Jack Ryan back in ’04 A day or two before this month’s elections, I spotted a curious political ad on TV. Bob Dold, the Republican candidate for Congress in the Tenth District, was boasting that the newspapers had spoken—and they all rejected his opponent, the Democratic incumbent, Brad Schneider. Imagine that! The second was shrewd. Back at Goldman Sachs he’d seen big retailers brought to their knees by “category killers”—specialty shops that did a better job of selling one thing than the department stores did selling anything....

It’s hard to believe that Chicago industrial-noise institution Bloodyminded haven’t released a studio album in seven years—it seems like the demonic bark of front man Mark Solotroff has been a fixture in this wolf’s nightmares for three times that long! The howling vocals and bowel-­splitting electronics on the new Within the Walls (released Tue 11/5 on Solotroff’s Bloodlust! label) could freak out the heartiest of souls. LPs will be available at a Sat 11/30 show with Corrections House at the Empty Bottle, but the band should have CD copies on Sat 11/9 at the Varnish Underground fest (whose huge bill also includes Raspberry Bulbs and Oozing Wound)....

The newest installment of the DJ-Kicks dance mix series, by Berlin producer Sascha Ring (aka Apparat), features the first new music from Telefon Tel Aviv since the passing of cofounder Charlie Cooper in early 2009. The track, “Lengthening Shadows,” is also featured on Sayulita, an EP Apparat released in conjunction with the mix on !K7 Records. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Since starting Specimen Products almost 25 years ago, luthier (and former guitarist for local acts Shrimp Boat and Falstaff) Ian Schneller has made a host of delicious-looking (and -sounding!...

Leor Galil,Reader staff writer East of the Rock I recently fell into a K-hole of early-90s Chicago rap and landed on East of the Rock, whose easygoing, jazz-sampling boom-bap sits well alongside music from, say, the Native Tongues collective. The group never put out a proper release during its lifespan; the closest it got was a 50-copy white-label run of an EP called Galaxy Rays in the mid-90s. Local ­label Black Pegasus reissued it a couple years ago, and Minneapolis rap-retail outlet Fifth Element has posted it on Soundcloud....

Aimee Levitt The best spaghetti and meatballs ever? It’s not such an odd thing to claim the “best spaghetti and meatballs ever” as the back-from-the-dead Centro Ristorante does on its menu. Sure, it’s grandiose and borderline obnoxious, especially considering how much spaghetti and meatballs there is in the world, but not impossible. Case in point: there’s plenty of roast chicken, too, and obviously, as much as it’s possible to determine ephemeral things like historical food, the Zuni Cafe’s recipe is the best roast chicken ever....

“Over one-third of the prisoners currently at Tamms have been there since the first year it was open. [That’s] over nine years, and for many ten full years in supermax confinement.” — Alan Mills, April 24 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ben Joravsky’s article on the construction of the soccer field in Lincoln Park by the Latin School is based on totally inept financial analysis....

Hard to know which baseball metaphor to use here. To say this Sideway Theater production strikes out doesn’t work since striking out is statistically normal. Even suggesting that it hits into a triple play seems inadequate, while calling it Cubs-like falsely implies that it shares the Cubs’ loser charm. Maybe if a Cub somehow struck out into a triple play . . . ? Mr. Baseball wants to be about the tragic final moments of a former slugger’s career, but neither playwright Matt Doherty nor director Michael Stock tells that story clearly, credibly, or competently....