Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the music world, technologies that go obsolete have a tendency not to stay that way. Pretty much every piece of performance or recording gear that’s ever been made outdated by something newer and allegedly better has, after a period of dormancy (and affordability to less cash-flush musicians and aficionados), roared back into fashion at price points that would have been completely unbelievable before....

In 1995 Chicago native Patti Vasquez was pursuing a PhD in history at Northwestern when she did a stand-up open mike on campus. “It was more fun than I could ever have dreamed,” she says. Within weeks she’d dropped out and begun bartending. She was a house emcee at Zanies on Wells for eight years before headlining, turning a corner, she says, with her first pregnancy (she has two kids): “I felt more confident....

Laying vintage Mobb Deep raps over beats made out of sounds taken from the Super Mario Bros. franchise seems like the most basic of jokes, something that’s good for a 30-second listen and a chuckle before it’s consigned to the dustbin of your browser history. But Mario Deep, an EP with exactly that setup that hit the Internet recently, is almost shockingly worth listening to, far beyond the simple novelty of the conceit....

From Oliveira’s The Cannibals This Saturday at midnight, Facets Multimedia will present The Cannibals, a rarely screened 1988 feature by Portugal’s greatest filmmaker, Manoel de Oliveira. Local filmmaker and professor Michael G. Smith, who will introduce the screening, describes the movie as “a freakish filmed opera in which every line of savage satire is sung.” He continues: It sounds like Cannibals abounds with the odd humor that runs through much of Oliveira’s work: consider the unexpected cat-hurling gag in Abraham’s Valley, the morbid punchline that concludes the seemingly gentle A Talking Picture, or Oliveira’s supremely eccentric decision to adapt Camilo Castelo Branco’s novella Doomed Love nearly word-for-word....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Chicago Humanities Festival continues, exploring the theme “Animal” and grappling with the question of what makes us human. Tonight Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket) discusses his new book, When Did You See Her Last?, at 6 PM at Francis W. Parker School (2233 N. Clark, $20). The festival runs through November 10; get a rundown and the full schedule at chicagohumanities....

The idea of Michael Jackson as a mythological figure isn’t anything new. No one gets as universally famous as he did without attaining something close to demigod status. The many eccentricities that he personally confirmed only fed rumors of other, weirder eccentricities that may or may not have been real–and his unwillingness to definitively address them led the public to consider every tale equally true. In turn that made Jackson seem all the more mythological....

See our reviews and live coverage of the bands playing on: Friday · Saturday ·Sunday Afterparties Pitchfork main » Luca CimarustiReader music listings coordinator 2:50 PM For some reason I always thought Parquet Courts were Australian. They’re not. They are really, really good though. 1 PM A Blue Stage kind of day. First up, hardcore-metal Canadians in KEN Mode, who have been scuzzing up a van since the release of the unfuckwithable Entrench....

QI am a straight, cross-dressing male into bondage. That’s not my problem. Recently I began seeing a professional Dominatrix for forced cross-dressing, among other things. She was great, but our last session ended abruptly when She told me that She wanted to start dildo training me. I was all for it, but I asked Her, politely, if She could use my dildo. In no uncertain terms, She said no. That’s hard for me to say, SHEESH, as I’m not a mind reader....

In this adaptation laden with vernacular speech and irony, Jose Rivera generally flattens and cheapens Pedro Calderon de la Barca’s 17th-century masterpiece Life Is a Dream. Both the romantic leads in this Greasy Joan & Co. production overact but in different styles, creating an emotional hole at the show’s center. But the core of Calderon’s feverish tale–about a crazed young prince imprisoned since birth because his horoscope predicted he’d become a tyrant–is captivating in the hands of director Julianne Ehre and her sophisticated supporting cast....

Paula Killen’s twitchy, addled solo performances in the late 80s and 90s made you wonder whether she’d ever relax onstage. It seemed to calm her nerves a bit to team up with salty stand-up Karol Kent in 1991 for the whiskey-soaked cabaret Music Kills a Memory, which ran on and off for seven years. Now that Killen’s had a kid, moved to LA, and enjoyed an eight-month run at the Upright Citizens Brigade there, she’s grounded at last, as her captivating performance here last summer in the hour-long, semi-improvised Sweet Ride proved....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In earlier years the first day of SXSW was only a couple steps up from Sunday, when all the worst bands are booked since almost everyone is on their way out of town. This year, though, Wednesday came into its own as a legit day with some serious action. Already I’ve had to make some tough decisions about which of two or three or four simultaneous kickass shows I’d make it to....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Something’s missing with the Bulls. Fighting for playoff position, they beat the top-ranked Detroit Pistons in the Eastern Conference 83-81 at the United Center Thursday night, but then couldn’t complete the deal against Cleveland at home Saturday, losing to the Cavs 112-108 in overtime. Thanks to the oddball ranking system the NBA uses to create its playoff seedings — division leaders are guaranteed slots in the top half of the draw no matter how bad they are — the Central Division Pistons and Cavs are up top, followed by the Atlantic-leading Toronto Raptors and the currently Southeast-leading Washington Wizards....

My maternal grandma was a tough old Jewish lady from an eastern European shtetl, the name of which is incised now on a glass wall at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Of course, she got out during the rule of the czars. I liked her quite a bit. She shared her poker winnings with me when I was little, and we watched The Monkees together every Monday night. But her position on diversity left a lot to be desired....

Should we as a society be concerned that there are getting to be as many shows for Halloween as there are Christmas Carols and Nutcrackers for Christmas? Not yet, I’d say. Wait until the Goodman Theatre starts doing one every year. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Dracula: A Tragedy This swirling, hallucinogenic overhaul of Bram Stoker’s classic horror novel is full of potent ideas....

Young Jazz Lions Stage Jazz on Jackson Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 2:20 PM Nicole Mitchell’s Black Earth Strings Increasingly prolific local flutist, composer, and bandleader Nicole Mitchell has just released Renegades (Delmark), the terrific debut of the Black Earth Strings, a spin-off of her Black Earth Ensemble. Its lively pieces—which make resourceful use of Tomeka Reid’s cello, Renee Baker’s violin and viola, and Josh Abrams’s bass and guimbri—alternate between swinging unison licks, fluttering counterpoint, and hovering clouds of dark, viscous colors, and each virtuosic solo arises at just the right moment....

In the auld Scottish ballad “Tam Lin,” the title character is a knight in a terrible spot. He’s been captured by the fairies and expects to be sacrificed this very Halloween, when their queen pays her tithe to hell. Luckily, he’s won the love of Janet, the bold girl from the castle down the road. She pulls Tam Lin from his horse as he rides in procession to his doom. The fairy queen (“an angry queen was she”) turns him into a snake, a bear, a lion, red-hot iron, and (depending on what version you read) molten lead, but Janet holds on to her man through it all, and he’s finally returned to human form—naked and free from the fairies’ thrall, if not Janet’s....

true grit Directed by joel and ethan coen Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mattie’s appeal to women is particularly evident in the short afterward that novelist Donna Tartt (The Secret History) wrote for the book in 2004: her great-grandmother was the first in her family to read True Grit and fell so in love with it that she passed it along to her own daughter, granddaughter, and great-granddaughter, each of whom embraced it as well....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I just got an email saying that the Cash Money deal I mention below is actually not happening, and that the Chief Keef Twitter account it was sent from is a fake, which is something I didn’t even consider. I guess impersonating established celebrities on Twitter has gotten old and now people are impersonating unsigned rappers? I don’t get it but it’s the Internet and a lot about the Internet makes no sense at all....

The book For better or for worse, Joyce Piven is most famous for being Jeremy’s mom. She got what has to have been the widest media exposure of her life when she showed up at the 2005 Emmy Awards as her actor son’s “date,” to watch him win a statuette for playing slippery talent rep Ari Gold on HBO’s Entourage. But Piven mere is much more than maternal arm candy....

QI’m stumped, Dan. In the novel Fifty Shades of Grey, which has been the subject of much discussion due to its controversial subject matter (a young woman gets involved in a BDSM relationship), the term “canning” is used numerous times. Despite my best efforts, I cannot find a definition for this practice. Who else can I turn to but you? —Confused And Naive, New Era Definition QI’m a 43-year-old woman, married for 19 years, and I need your help!...