The pop group Karmin, a duo consisting of multi-instrumentalist Nick Noonan and vocalist Amy Heidemann, started releasing music in 2010 but didn’t break until the following year, and it wasn’t on the strength of original material. Rather they got popular off a series of cover songs that they posted to YouTube: hit rap and R&B singles rendered with a jazzy, theatrical flair and an unmistakable wink. Hundreds of millions of plays would follow, as well as a spot on Ellen and a major-label contract....

MAY Thu16 Fifth House Ensemble in Austin Town Hall Park The community-based chamber music ensemble presents a narrative concert about a secretary whose work piles up as she’s sucked into a consumerist nightmare on the Internet. Hm. 6:30-8 PM, 5610 W. Lake, 773-287-7658, chicagoparkdistrict.com, free. Mon20 Chicago Craft Beer Week We’re in the thick of Craft Beer Week (5/16-5/26) and pubs all over town are hosting beer dinners, beer tastings, trivia nights, and brewing demonstrations....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I don’t know many other small, getaway towns that are this progressive,” Aron Packer, a Chicago gallerist who’d opened a place in Three Oaks, told McEwen. “I haven’t had to change my focus here,” he said. “It’s just as contemporary, just as challenging as my Chicago gallery.” And then there was the Acorn Theater, offering plays, concerts, and comedy in a renovated corset-bone factory....

Radar Eyes didn’t come together by accident, but the band probably owes its continued existence to chance. In late 2006 drummer Shelley Zawadzki and guitarist-vocalists Nathan Luecking and Anthony Cozzi were all playing in an aggressive local noise-punk band called Night of the Hunter, which had embarked on a seemingly cursed recording project. Working with engineer Kenny Rasmussen, probably best known at the time as the bassist for No Funeral, they produced not the album they’d intended to but instead a series of dead reel-to-reel machines, all of which had expired during the sessions....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For three more days Mubi.com is streaming Yousry Nasrallah’s After the Battle for free as part of their Dialogue of Cultures International Film Festival. I posted an overview of the program over the weekend, but I feel that After the Battle merits special attention. The movie addresses recent social upheaval in Egypt, and more often in personal, rather than political, terms....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Julia Thiel‘s cover story from last week’s issue, a profile of chef Iliana Regan, is ostensibly about someone who parlayed her talent as a forager into increasingly ambitious and profitable endeavors, first an underground restaurant and now a forthcoming fine-dining restaurant. But what makes the story a writer’s dream is how the subject of foraging can be interpreted as having more than one meaning—one definition is “to wander in search of forage or food” and another is “to make a search”—one is very specific, while the other can be read broadly....

Heartbreaking, hilarious, gruffly compassionate, and breathtakingly bold in its thematic scope, Tracy Letts’s drama about a monumentally screwed-up clan in rural Oklahoma is one of the best American plays of the last decade. It bears obvious similarities to other great works about thwarted dreams and the wounds caused by blood ties, notably Long Day’s Journey Into Night and Three Sisters, but stands on its own considerable merits. When a retired academic disappears from the home he shares with his pill-popping wife, his three daughters and other family members show up, unleashing a series of recriminations and revelations....

Peter Kepha and Lauren Pacheco, founders of the Chicago Urban Art Society (CUAS) check the mailbox for: Kolaj magazine and Elephant magazine We remember those days visiting the library or making the trek to the Kroch’s and Brentano’s in the Loop to grab our favorite magazines. Now we stay tuned to contemporary art practice by reading two magazines everyone should get their hands on: Kolaj and Elephant. It’s not just the mind-blowing content but the printing quality and actual physical weight of these magazines that make it feel OK to drop the money....

Sue Kwong This winter, the Reader has set a humble goal for itself: to determine the Greatest Chicago Book Ever Written. We chose 16 books that reflected the wide range of books that have come out of Chicago and the wide range of people who live here and assembled them into an NCAA-style bracket. Then we recruited a crack team of writers, editors, booksellers, and scholars as well as a few Reader staffers to judge each bout....

Most likely no one reading this post will ever have to worry about dressing for an audience with the queen of England, as fashion writer Sarah Mower did when preparing to receive an M.B.E. In the New York Times: T magazine article, Mower details her anxiety about choosing the proper ensemble for the ceremony, finally choosing an outfit by British designer Roksanda Ilincic, a hat by noted milliner Stephen Jones, and some specially made Manolo Blahniks....

A still from the video for “Iron Gates” Two men kiss in the video for Dylan Wright’s song “Iron Gates,” but that’s not the queerest thing about it. The local singer-songwriter throws both “gay” and “queer” into his Bandcamp tags right next to “folk” and “acoustic,” which prompts the question: If “queer” is a genre, what does it mean? This year has seen high-profile releases from artists all struggling to come up with an answer, from Perfume Genius’s industrial glam to Owen Pallett’s violin-streaked angst to Arca’s dysmorphic glitches....

Were the 9/11 attacks actually perpetrated by an art-rock band from Texas? The artwork on the second album from EXPLOSIONS IN THE SKY, released in late August 2001, includes an illustration of a biplane bearing the caption “This plane will crash tomorrow,” but the transcendent intensity of their soaring instrumentals would be better suited to levitating the Pentagon than collapsing it. Like the band’s previous discs, the new All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone (Temporary Residence) exudes the post-rock grandeur of Mogwai, Sigur Ros, or Godspeed You!...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Well, talk about serendipity: this week, through February 22, Siskel Film Center is screening Herzog’s latest (not counting Rescue Dawn, which isn’t yet in release), the semi/quasi/crypto “faerie land” documentary The Wild Blue Yonder, to provide a critical case in point. Local critics haven’t been kind, and it’s not hard to see why. Haphazardly throwing together large chunks of drab utilitarian footage (NASA astronauts lounging around in space, etc) with weird, hallucinatory views of antarctic undersea fauna and interpolated shots of Brad Dourif doing his maniacal best to bring Klaus Kinski back to (not of this) earthly life—obviously Herzog misses that guy a lot—the film is nothing if not its own unearthly mess....

I can barely believe what I’m about to write: Thank God for Mayor Daley and his tax increment financing program. Of course, it was never the mayor’s intention to use TIF money for emergency relief, and he might have to be dragged kicking and screaming to the point of actually doing that. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Despite the hullabaloo every fall when the City Council approves Mayor Daley’s budget, the city’s general fund only gets about 19 percent of the property taxes paid in Chicago....

TIMBALAND | TIMBALAND PRESENTS SHOCK VALUE (MOSLEY MUSIC GROUP/INTERSCOPE) Their new albums could hardly be more different sonically, but El-P’s I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead (released last month on his Definitive Jux label) and Timbaland’s Timbaland Presents Shock Value (released Tuesday by his Mosley Music Group, a subsidiary of Interscope) are both perfect examples of the producer record–a tradition that’s birthed classics like Dr. Dre’s The Chronic and duds like Pharrell’s In My Mind....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 1 PM: As a clotheshorse I spend more time figuring out what to wear than which bands are playing. Pitchfork’s not big on celebrity fashion (though I’m hoping Joakim Noah might get hip and leave Lolla behind). But it’s still a challenge: What outfit can handle the heat, goes well with neon, and isn’t prone to porta-potty fail? Once that is established—and combined with a cuppa Star Lounge coffee—the Atlas Moth will be my loud, locally sourced start to the day....

Browntrout The large double-sided menu at Dudley Nieto’s Old Town tapas restaurant Eivissa, named for the Balearic party isle of Ibiza, features a pair of ostensible bloodstains over which are superimposed a pair of incomprehensible non sequiturs: “Taste the art. Drink with all senses” and “The essence of the essence.” If the aim is to foreshadow a sense of discombobulation, then bravo. Nieto, who rivals Geno Bahena for the archipelago of restaurants he’s skipped about, has forgone his usual Mexican in favor of a bisected approach to tapas, aspiring to both tradition and the more modern wave of Spanish gastronomy born of Ferran Adria....

Northalsted Market Days brags that it’s the midwest’s largest two-day street festival, and it expects more than 100,000 attendees to head to Lakeview on Sat 8/11 and Sun 8/12. The fest has 400 food and arts vendors as well as four stages of live music along Halsted: one at Belmont, one at Aldine (the Jazz Stage), one at Roscoe, and one at Brompton (called the Rivers Casino North Stage). The presence of a Jazz Stage notwithstanding, the bookings lean toward crowd-pleasing pop, tribute bands, and 80s revival acts....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One of Curtis’s most distinctive traits as a storyteller is to introduce all his subjects, whether they’re living or dead, as though they were fictional characters. “Our story begins…” he likes to say, a variation on “once upon a time.” Even when he’s talking about Ayn Rand (as he does in part one of All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace) or Richard Dawkins (as he does in part three), Curtis makes them sound as though they lived long ago and far away....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At the opening of his show “Harlem, U.S.A.” last week at the Art Institute, photographer Dawoud Bey appeared in conversation with Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, author of the book Harlem Is Nowhere. They swapped notes on how Harlem had changed—the photos that AIC recently bought, wonderful portraits of neighborhood characters, were all shot in the 1970s, and Rhodes-Pitts’s book is about some time she spent there in the aughts....