Transplanted Michiganders sometimes slip up and use the term “party store” in mixed company, forgetting for a moment that few people raised outside the state know that it refers to what’s more commonly—albeit less enthusiastically—called a liquor store. (I wonder how many out-of-staters think people from Michigan are subject to strange and sudden cravings for balloons and streamers.) Mick Collins, a recent emigre to Brooklyn after decades of service in the Detroit music scene, named the new Dirtbombs album Party Store (In the Red), and it’s tempting to imagine he did so precisely because he realized that most of his audience wouldn’t get what he meant by it....

Al Podgorski/Sun-Times Media A champion of the minimum wage increase? When you head to the polls in February, Mayor Emanuel is hoping you’ll think of him as a man of the people. You know, rather than the guy who closed all those public schools and mental health clinics while managing to scrape together the money to build a sports arena and a Marriott hotel. And certainly not as the guy who was silent on increasing the minimum wage in Chicago until plans started developing at the state level, and publicly undercut Governor Quinn by 75 cents when the governor was fighting to get reelected....

After hearing Catfish Haven’s new record, Devastator (Secretly Canadian), I went back and listened to their two EPs and their first full-length, trying to figure out how anybody had ever pegged them as an indie-rock band. Turns out I’d remembered those discs as poppier than they really are—these guys are so deep into 70s rock that they make their retro-loving labelmates Jason Molina and David Vandervelde look like futurists. Though they’ve got scruffy Logan Square facial hair and they’re not nearly old or jaded enough for the job, they sound like they ought to be playing a weekly gig at a blue-collar suburban bar, not a record-release party at Metro....

Thursday2 Scissor Sisters Friday3 David Boykin Expanse Saturday4 Tambours Sans Frontieres Sunday5 Dum Dum Girls Monday6 Dollyrots Cancelled Wednesday8 Rhys Chatham, Bill OrcuttRich Corpolongo TrioMichael Rother’s Hallogallo 2010Tambours Sans Frontieres friday3 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » DAVID BOYKIN EXPANSE Saxophonist David Boykin has long embraced a fiercely independent ethos—he releases his own recordings, books his own concerts, and plays only as a bandleader. (The exception: he’ll be a sideman to his partner, jazz flutist Nicole Mitchell....

There are two sets of palettes at work in the new Court Theatre staging of The Misanthrope. One emphasizes black and gold, especially in the exuberantly filigreed costumes created by Jacqueline Firkins. The other is all about flesh tones—deep brown to pink. Erik Hellman stands at the pale end of the spectrum, playing the brutally honest title character, Alceste, at a level of whiteness commonly associated with people of European descent....

Nella Grassano ruined pizza for Chicago. Or at least she ruined the notion that even bad pizza is good pizza. That was in early 2006, when she first enchanted us at Spacca Napoli as the taciturn pizzaiola who emigrated from the Boot along with a 13,000-pound volcanic-stone oven. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I was reminded of that in the middle of writing this review when I found myself checking out Big Bricks, the second outlet from the owners of Lincoln Park’s 15-year-old Bricks....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As the Hitchcock 9 proves, even a director as storied and studied as Alfred Hitchcock can have films still virtually unseen by a wider audience. Seeing a “new” work by a legendary director—the Northwest Chicago Film Society‘s recent screening of the long-lost John Ford film Upstream, for example—is an exciting prospect. People often erroneously assume that film history is set in stone, that we’ve learned all there is to learn and seen all there is to see....

Just days before the Cubs season opener in 2005, amateur filmmaker Paul Hoffman premiered his documentary about Chicago Cubs superfan Ronnie “Woo Woo” Wickers at a gala benefit at the Chicago Historical Society. Hoffman’s former college roommate at Indiana University, Lou Stanczak, had befriended Wickers and would take him to Notre Dame football games, typically returning with anecdotes about Chicago baseball’s zaniest superfan. At a Fourth of July barbecue in 2000, Stanczak told Hoffman Woo Woo’s backstory: how he recalled being raised by an abusive mother on the south side; how he’d fallen in love with baseball on trips to Wrigley Field with his grandmother to see Jackie Robinson play for the Brooklyn Dodgers; how years later he’d ended up cheering for the Cubs during the afternoon, working as a janitor at Northwestern University in the evenings, and retiring late at night to his cardboard box downtown....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The story opens by citing the 1981 David Byrne-Brian Eno collaboration My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (reissued in 2006 by Nonesuch) as “an album cheekily designed to imitate the exoticism of so-called ‘world’ music.” Where to begin? The term “world music” didn’t come into currency until 1983, after a consortium of DJs and label folks met in England to come up with a way to market records that had no clear home in Western music stores–they found it frustrating that African records were routinely shoved in the reggae section, for example....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The new year is a couple weeks away, but I’m anxious to start 2014 so I can soak in a handful of forthcoming albums including one from Shawn Rosenblatt’s Netherfriends project, P3ACE. The constantly touring Chicago indie-popper is set to drop the album in March, and last week he debuted a new single, “Joey Vision.” It’s an irresistibly hooky, propulsive track made with a tight psych-guitar riff, and it’s today’s 12 O’Clock Track....

A lip-synching drag queen Titania, a leather-loving Oberon, androgynous sybarites, and biker fairies in orgiastic raves: MidTangent Productions’ “queer tale” treats Shakespeare’s lovers as mismatched closet cases who get sorted into same-sex partnerships. There’s no hidden agenda, just a well-seized opportunity to turn the Bard’s sturdy comedy into a vehicle for salacious anachronisms (“How now, faggots?”). Over the last three years, Tony Lewis’s staging has gotten louder and looser, but his adaptation remains inconsistently lavender....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As it turns out, Geovany Soto would not be the first rookie to be the primary starting catcher on a World Series winner — even if the Cubs manage to pull it off. Thanks and a tip of the cap to Ajax, who pointed out in responding to a previous post that Andy Etchebarren was the rookie catcher on the 1966 world-champion Baltimore Orioles....

Are these visuals of the seapunk variety or vaporwave? It’s been a hot minute since Rihanna’s Saturday Night Live performance turned seapunk into the kind of subculture that the whole family could enjoy making fun of, which has led to this hellish postseapunk wasteland where the term is applied to anything new that uses outmoded, chintzy looking graphics. It’s as if no one cares about the mechanics of URL-derived pop terminology!...

Running have always had an aesthetic sense more sophisticated than that of a typical noise-punk band. Their J-card in their debut tape had been personally stomped on and scraped up by members of the band, their first full-length had a hand-­lithographed cover, and the cassette Running Forever was set up in a loop so that it played a literally eternal sludge riff. This distinctive approach is one of the things that’s made Running the envy of many other Chicago bands—speaking for myself, I was delighted when garage punks Heavy Times recruited Running bassist Matthew Hord to play alongside me in their rhythm section....

You don’t need to skip out on certain Chicago cuisine just because you prefer seitan to pulled pork. Meatless versions of Italian beef subs and Chicago dogs are readily available at spots like Native Foods, the Chicago Diner, and even Hot Doug’s sausage emporium. But the best vegetarian rendition of a meaty classic can be found at Ground Control, the cozy all-veg spot that opened a little over seven months ago in Logan Square....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This Friday and Saturday the Music Box will present Cinemapocalypse, two nights of exploitation films and otherwise disreputable material programmed by the folks at Austin’s beloved Alamo Drafthouse. One of the highlights is a 35-millimeter screening of Vice Squad (1982), a Los Angeles-set thriller directed by Chicago native Gary Sherman, who will be in attendance to answer audience questions after the film....

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Fusce erat orci, pulvinar in eros a, euismod semper purus. Sed faucibus ipsum enim, id dapibus orci scelerisque facilisis. Vestibulum mi odio, pellentesque sed dui sit amet, pharetra facilisis enim. Vivamus nulla ipsum, tincidunt gravida interdum vel, fringilla a ante. Aliquam pulvinar metus in euismod hendrerit. Praesent non cursus libero. Nunc scelerisque vestibulum est, a ullamcorper nisi elementum nec. Aenean pretium aliquam ante....

Earth Day hits 40 this year, so be sure to buy it an organic cotton “Lordy, Lordy, Look Who’s 40!” sweatshirt or something. (Just kidding—Earth Day would totally hate that gift.) Organizations citywide are celebrating all week by hosting cleanups, green living info workshops, and other activities. A partial list of Earth Day events selected from our in-box follows; many other events are listed at earthday.net/chicago. —Lauri Apple Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Last weekend the Washington Post ran a story about perpetual singles—those who never, ever find “the one.” It focused more on women than on men, which is unsurprising in a society where Newsweek once famously (and erroneously) reported that a woman over 40 had a greater chance of being killed by a terrorist than getting married. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In two other recently produced plays, Aces and Blizzard ’67, the Chicago-based Steinhagen showed serious chops as a chronicler of male bonding while demonstrating a gift for ensemble scenes rife with lacerating banter....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » So should you care? Well, the folks at Destihl are responsible for the Saint Dekkera Reserve sour ales, which caused quite a stir at Denver’s Great American Beer Festival in 2011 and have since attracted long lines of nerds wherever they’ve appeared. These unblended single-barrel sours are spontaneously fermented, without a deliberate inoculation of yeast or other microorganisms, and spend anywhere from one to three and a half years aging in oak....