Even knowing that its members have played in Xiu Xiu and Degenerate Art Ensemble, that their professed influences include Prince, Coltrane, and Einsturzende Neubauten, and that the songs are occasionally named after D & D critters, you still won’t be prepared for this Seattle trio. Their light-footed, percussive, breathy strain of art pop first really jelled on 2005’s Frost Giant (Absolutely Kosher) and reached new heights on “Pinky Ring,” from a split single on KDVS late last year: the hilariously arch delivery gives it a sort of androgynous cabaret sexuality, and the abortive surges and playful feints combine melodic instinct with automatic-writing logic in a way that actually does remind me a bit of Neubauten–their recent stuff, at least....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jason Segel is the ideal rom-com star for women who find Woody Allen too macho. In movies like Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Bad Teacher, and now The Five-Year Engagement, Segel plays the sort of sensitive, considerate, moony, doughy everyman that most American women end up with (if they’re lucky). For the guys dragged along to see these movies, there’s the implicit promise that being sensitive and considerate (if not moony or doughy) will score you a babe like Mila Kunis, Cameron Diaz, or Emily Blunt, respectively....

David Abed’s Dissolve Sartre wrote that man is condemned to be free. He is flung into the world and the fact of his existence is the only thing in life that he is not responsible for. Everything else is a choice. Even the act of not choosing is a choice. There is no determinism, only the dizzying, infinitely unfolding possibilities of free will. We chose how to act, how to respond, and in doing so, we choose who we are....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Every Doc Films program contains at least a few must-see movies, but the autumn calendar contains an embarrassment of riches. There are partial retrospectives of four of the most important filmmakers working today—Terence Davies, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, David Fincher, and Olivier Assayas—as well as one devoted to John Cassavetes, one of the most important U.S. filmmakers ever. (If only that revival of A Woman Under the Influence weren’t taking place at the same time as that Sparks concert at Lincoln Hall ....

In the beginning of the aughts, R&B singer Bilal was making a name for himself as a member of the creatively fecund musical outfit known as the Soulquarians (which counted D’Angelo, Erykah Badu, Common, J Dilla, and members of the Roots, chiefly ?uestlove, among its members). After a prominent appearance on Common’s “The 6th Sense,” Bilal dropped his debut album 1st Born Second on Interscope, which featured chart-placing singles such as the Dr....

Nine years ago Violetta Adrien began to build a nest egg selling the pastries every Haitian knows as pâtés. Every week she’d stuff doughy pockets with beef, chicken, salt cod, or vegetables and bake them by the dozens for church gatherings and private parties. If “you don’t have it at parties it is not Haitian,” she says. “I start making my piggy bank, and every time I do a party I take it home and I drop in $50, $100....

I’ll admit that I have no idea what the desert tastes like. But I do have an imagination, and 5 Grass, the latest release from the year-old 5 Rabbit Cerveceria, could well be it. That’s what the brewers had in mind when they were making it, at least; founder Isaac Showaki says that for the final installment in their lineup of flagship beers—which also includes 5 Lizard, a Latin-style witbier; 5 Vulture, a Oaxacan-style dark ale; and 5 Rabbit, a golden ale—they wanted a beer that smells and tastes like—you guessed it—the desert....

Joan of Arc joanfrc.com Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Yeah, Tim Kinsella gets a lot of love in the Reader—or at least affectionate teasing—but there’s a reason music critics love him. You never know what you’re getting into when you go to one of his shows or put on one of his new records. It might be political art rock. It might be glitchy experimentation....

If West Deerfield Township is representative, record numbers of voters are turning out in the North Suburban 10th Congressional District, where incumbent Mark Kirk is battling challenger Dan Seals. Voters were lined up when polls opened; by mid-morning there was brisk traffic, much higher than normal, but there were no lines. No problems with the lo-tech ballots either, except for those who never mastered coloring in the lines. At the 422nd Precinct, voting in the pool house at country-club-like Deerspring Park, about 60 people had queued up in the unseasonably warm morning air for the 6 AM opening; by 10 AM, the vote count was 578....

As a young man, Evelyn Waugh was anything but pious: his early years were marked by attempted suicide, affairs with both men and women, a bitter divorce, and heavy drinking. In 1924, at age 20, he even collaborated with some friends at Oxford University to produce an amateur film—The Scarlet Woman: An Ecclesiastical Melodrama—that mocked religion in general and Catholicism in particular, with Waugh as a gay Oxford don trying to seduce the Prince of Wales....

Fans of free jazz and improvised music tend to be fervid, but record sales are another story. This is fringe music, but the people who follow it are passionate, and since the music tends to be well documented by small independent labels spread all over the globe, there are a lot of records and CDs to purchase. Considering small runs—which generally peak out at 1,000 copies—these titles often lack good distribution, which is why when many traveling musicians visit town they often set up a merchandise table that looks like a pop-up record shop....

YOU DON’T LOVE ME YET | JONATHAN LETHEM (DOUBLEDAY) YOU DON’T LOVE ME YET | Jonathan Lethem | The latest from Jonathan Lethem is a slight thing, less a novel than a playful workout for his ideas about the slippery nature of creativity, authorship, and ownership, which he most recently aired in his February Harper’s essay, “The Ecstasy of Influence.” There he made mincemeat of the notion of individual genius by stealing bits and pieces from other writers and stitching them together into a virtuoso patchwork of plagiarism....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Blackwater USA, a military training organization-cum-private army that’s been the subject of controversy over its role as a private contractor in Iraq, just opened a training facility near Mount Carroll, a town on the Mississippi River west of Rockford. The company was founded in 1996 by Erik Prince, an automobile-parts scion and former navy SEAL who named the company after the black water on its grounds in North Carolina, and not, apparently, in an attempt to make it sound as sinister as possible....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last year New York’s Klezmatics released a double CD called Live at Town Hall on their own Klezmatics Disc label, an in-concert overview of a career that at the time was 25 years long. Back in 1986, when the band played its first gig, klezmer was largely forgotten, though in the 70s people like Andy Statman and the Klezmer Conservatory Band had passionately fought its extinction....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The series, which McNamara cofounded and curates, launches its fourth season February 5 with the premiere of Osso Bucco, starring character actor Mike Starr as a mobster enjoying one last meal in Chicago before a potentially fatal mission and Illeana Douglas, the waitress for whom he carries a torch. Directors Gary Taylor and Fred Blurton, both local advertising vets, and most of the cast will join McNamara at the screening and the cocktail receptions before and after....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Some of the developments Denby notes are clearly bad news (a theatrical distribution model geared toward big opening weekends and, therefore, children and teenagers), some are clearly good news (digital distribution, which may level the playing field between the multinational corporations that own the studios and the kid shooting a movie in his basement). But the knottiest problem Denby considers is the advent of digital exhibition—projecting movies not from 35-millimeter prints, which must be physically delivered in cans weighing 50 to 80 pounds, but from a hard drive....

KAREN DALTON GREEN ROCKY ROAD (DELMORE) PYHA THE HAUNTED HOUSE (TUMULT) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Two recent offerings on that unholy altar are among the best releases of the summer: Karen Dalton’s Green Rocky Road and Pyha’s The Haunted House. Both consist of music made in virtual isolation by brilliant eccentrics and then very nearly lost. Dalton was an almost-famous Greenwich Village folkie from the 60s whose musical legacy consists largely of ingratiating, bluesy guitar tracks on which she sings like an improbably docile Billie Holiday; the two albums she released in her lifetime, in ’69 and ’71, were both reissued in 2006....

Troy Graves has returned to the corner of Damen and Charleston, where he was once chef at Meritage, before it was Duchamp, before Duchamp became Red Door, the new gastropub whose kitchen Graves (also formerly of Tallulah, Eve, and the Algonquin restaurant Montarra) oversees. The red doors—both in front and out back—are said to symbolize hospitality. Through door number one is an elegant, minimalist bar and a little dining area; in its intimacy and its low light it sort of recalls Danny’s, the bar across the street, though this is really the only way in which it resembles its scruffier neighbor....

In the Neighborhood Adesso is a return to his Italian roots for owner Franco Gianni, who’s also behind Tank Sushi and Sushi Wabi. The southern Italian cooking in this 32-seat space is meant to be unfussy and accessible, in an atmosphere of festive neighborliness (no kidding—parties are seated together at communal tables). Simple ingredients stood out in a bruschetta of thick rustic bread, ricotta, and slightly roasted tomatoes topped with honey—the ricotta was the type of fresh that makes you wonder if you’ve ever truly tasted a food before....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Loukaniko is commonly a lamb and pork sausage flavored with fennel and orange peel, which gives it a bright citrusy aroma. The scholars at Wikipedia claim there are linguistic relationships to Portuguese linguica, Spanish longaniza, and Bulgarian lukanka, though I don’t see many similarities as far as spicing and texture go. It shows up on the menu at some other Greek restaurants around town, including the relatively new Mythos in Lincoln Square, which has a pretty good one....