Charles Ludlam was an icon of queer theater. The actor-writer’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company—a spin-off from the Play-House of the Ridiculous, established in 1965 by Warhol protege Ronald Tavel—specialized in genderfuck, where men dress as women with little effort to disguise their maleness. In shows like Turds in Hell, Whores of Babylon, and Eunuchs of the Forbidden City, the Ridiculous used bad drag and broad overacting to attack convention and celebrate what Ludlam called “the deviant and the original....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As follow-up to my January 15 post dumping on Krzysztof Kieslowski (though actually it didn’t: more like precise contextual description, applying to just one film), what say we play around with this idea: that Michael Haneke‘s the anti-Kieslowski of our time. Not all of Haneke, obviously, and in fact maybe only the recent Caché exactly fits the model, but do consider: the reflecting glass that Kieslowski’s “Trois Couleurs” systematically applies to the audience’s self-infatuated gaze—so fine to think these elegant thoughts, feel these delicate feelings, consume these exquisitely upmarket consumables, etc—Haneke just as systematically shatters: thoughts curdled, feelings gone to seed, consumables like ashes to the touch, almost a death’s shroud....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The title track from Agwambo (Kanyo), the new album by veteran Kenyan band Bana Kadori, is like a burned-out car left by the side of the road: it’s an optimistic benediction for opposition leader Raila “Agwambo” Odinga, written when he was expected to win the presidential election held in December. Of course, Odinga was edged by incumbent Mwai Kibaki, and widespread suspicion of voting fraud helped plunge what had been one of Africa’s most stable countries into fierce political and ethnic violence that’s left more than a thousand dead, hundreds of thousands driven from their homes, and the nation in shock....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ban proponents have had all the momentum in the five weeks since. Several leading Congressional Democrats have proposed a ban on all food and drink containers with the chemical. State rep Elaine Nekritz, among the most environmentally conscious legislators in the General Assembly, introduced a bill that would prohibit the sale in Illinois of bottles and food containers with BPA that are intended for children under three; 19 other lawmakers have signed on as cosponsors....

Brazilian Guitar Fuzz Bananas: Tropicalia Psychedelic Masterpieces 1967-1976 (Tropicalia in Furs/World Psychedelic Funk Classics) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Many of the 16 tracks on Pomegranates: Persian Pop, Funk, Folk and Psych of the 60s and 70s have been reissued before, but this is the first time they’ve been broadly distributed or packaged for non-Iranian audiences. Exact dates for the original releases are hard to come by—as the liner notes explain, Iranian singles mostly used boilerplate label designs that didn’t include such specifics—but one thing that’s certain is that they predate the Iranian Revolution of 1979....

[Plus: Mexican Worth the Trek: Northern specialties, handmade flour tortillas, and 14 salsas at a pollo joint in west-suburban Northlake] MEXICAN | BREAKFAST, LUNCH, DINNER: MONDAY-SATURDAY | closed sunday | BYO MEXICAN | BREAKFAST: SATURDAY-SUNDAY; LUNCH: SUNDAY-MONDAY, WEDNESDAY-SATurday; DINNER: MONDAY, WEDNESDAY-FRIDAY | CLOSED TUESDAY | BYO MEXICAN | BREAKFAST, LUNCH: SEVEN DAYS | BYO | RESERVATIONS NOT ACCEPTED Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Sunday-morning pork rush at Carnitas Don Pedro presents a trial of forbearance appropriate for the after-church crowd....

Here is a hard demographic reality, or at least an ignorant guess: if, as we’ve noted in this space before, the area of downtown Chicago north of the river and west of Michigan Avenue is a clubby, bejeweled but no less vomit-encrusted gutter for Chicago’s young uncreative classes, the area just east of Michigan is where the disposably incomed go when they grow up, or at least want a good night’s sleep....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The legendary Portage Theater—Chicago’s oldest movie palace still in operation—is in the news again. On Friday Jim DeRogatis reported at WBEZ’s website that Erineo “Eddie” Carranza, the theater’s new owner as of September 1, served a five-day eviction notice to the current management on the grounds that they owe approximately $103,000 in back rent. DeRogatis posted another report on Sunday, going into further detail on the bad blood between Carranza and Portage Park alderman John Arena....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In any case, pumpkins were originally used in brewing not for their flavor, but because they were plentiful and contain a lot of fermentable sugars. According to the Oxford Companion to Beer, pumpkin ale was invented in the 18th century by English colonists who used pumpkin juice as a substitute for cereal malts (which made it more of a wine than a beer)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The husband-and-wife team of Johnny Irion and Sarah Lee Guthrie (Woody’s granddaughter) return to town on Saturday night, opening for the glib jam band ukulele whiz Jake Shimabukuro at the Old Town School of Folk Music. Together and apart the pair traffic in California-style country from the early 70s, steeped heavily in the cosmic twang of Gram Parsons via the Jayhawks, whose Gary Louris produced their most recent album, Exploration (New West, 2006)....

There are a lot of New York rappers these days attracting attention for the work they’re doing charting a broad range of possible courses for hip-hop to take into the future, but there’s also a contingent doing good work that’s focused squarely on rap’s past accomplishments. At the front of that group (and of a crew called Pro Era) is the young Brooklynite Joey Bada$$, who has a firm but dextrous flow and a penchant for bucket hats that come straight out of the kind of early-90s East Coast boom bap that Gang Starr may have come closest to perfecting....

Garang Mayuol was in the cow pasture with his father when the shooting started. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After his father’s death, Mayuol lived with a foster family at the UN camp. Then, in 1991, when Eritrea won its independence from Ethiopia, the Eritreans cleared the camp, forcing the refugees back across the border into Sudan. The Sudanese military in turn bombed them for a week, driving them south toward Kenya....

Jaden Smith in After Earth The most valuable player on After Earth, the big-budget sci-fi feature that opens in general release today, may well be cinematographer Peter Suschitzky. As David Cronenberg’s regular cameraman since Dead Ringers, Suschitzky has developed a look of uncanny glossiness in their numerous films together. His lighting never feels unnatural, yet there’s always something off about it—it seems almost too controlled, as if the drama were playing out in a museum diorama....

Thinkstock Young people eschew privacy for their “global village.” America began as a largely rural country, and it could be that the Founding Fathers, to the extent they gave privacy a thought, figured that in the towns and villages they hailed from everyone knew everybody’s business anyway. The Constitution they wrote doesn’t mention privacy. This put Supreme Court justice William Douglas to the test in 1965, when the Court voted 7-2 to strike down an 1879 Connecticut law forbidding use of “any drug, medicinal article, or instrument for the purpose of preventing conception....

The 12th annual Asian American Showcase, presented by the Foundation for Asian American Independent Media and the Gene Siskel Film Center, continues through Thursday, April 12, with screenings at the Film Center. Tickets are $9, $7 for students, and $5 for Film Center members; for more information call 312-846-2800. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Dark Matter A brilliant Chinese student (Ye Liu of Purple Butterfly) thinks his dreams have come true when he arrives at a California university to study astrophysics under his idol (Aidan Quinn), but after the young man develops a dazzling new theory that contradicts his mentor’s model of the universe, he gets a chilly lesson in academic politics....

Chances Dances chancesdances.org Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Just because you’re gay doesn’t mean a night out dancing has to involve an overpriced superclub or some Boys Town bar’s attempt at a circuit party. And just because you’re straight doesn’t mean that you have to feel like an interloper at a gay club night. Chances Dances, which advertises itself as a “LezBiGayTransIntersexQueer” party, proves both points twice a month—first Saturdays at the Hideout and third Mondays at Subterranean....

wild mushroom-brown rice burger at Sable Kitchen & Bar 505 N. State 312-755-9704 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ironically the best veggie burger I’ve encountered in years is on the (lunch) menu at a place that offers so many other good-looking vegetable preparations—sweet corn creme brulee, crispy red lentil cake in coconut red curry broth, spring pea-asparagus soup with minted yogurt—that you might never feel compelled to order it....

The Reader’s Choice: Fogo de Chao Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Rooted in the gaucho tradition, this gonzo meat circus brings the primordial experience of cooking animals on sticks over fire to the urban jungle that is River North. Accordingly, many patrons work themselves into a macho carnivorous frenzy, ignoring or dismissing what is surely one of the greatest salad bars in the universe, piled high with vegetables, cheeses, olives, salami, and smoked salmon....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Of course, this wasn’t actual Champagne (as in the sparkling wine produced in the Champagne region of France) but the appellation or “product category” used to to describe sparkling wines produced in great quantities in the former Soviet Union. The story goes that in the mid-30s Stalin, that lovable man of the people, decreed that there should be bubbly to sustain Mother Russia’s workers, and a former Tsarist winemaker named Anton Frolov-Bagreyev was tapped to ramp up production....

Hang out with enough professional-grade rappers and you’ll notice a number of shared traits that differentiate them from civilians—that they’re capable of superhuman feats of lateness, for instance, and can amass collections of hangers-on as impenetrably dense as the entourages of A-list Hollywood actors. You’ll also find that they tend to be ridiculously funny. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In case you needed a refresher, this month the trio’s self-titled 1984 debut LP got the deluxe re­issue treatment from Tin Pan Apple, the label founded by their ambitious Swedish-born manager, Charlie Stettler....