Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sam Phillips, Don’t Do Anything (Nonesuch)On her first self-produced album, Sam Phillips proves herself an excellent student of her ex-husband, T-Bone Burnett, who was behind the boards for most of her previous records–she gives the music the same kind of unraveling, broken-down sound that he did. Her songwriting betrays her love for the Beatles and, to a lesser extent, Kurt Weill, and her husky, molasses-thick voice manages to make even her darkest lyrics (which are plenty dark) sound somehow soothing....

One of the most sensational crime stories ever to come out of Great Britain was the 1993 murder of two-year-old James Bulger by a pair of ten-year-old truants in the suburbs of Liverpool. The killers, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, spotted little James wandering unattended in a shopping center, walked him several miles to a railway line, tortured him, and bludgeoned him to death with an iron bar, dropping his body on the tracks so that his death might be attributed to a train....

Dib Sushi Bar and Thai Cuisine Neighborhood Thai-sushi restaurants are ubiquitous these days, but it’s rare you’ll find one as polished as this Uptown storefront. White floor-to-ceiling drapes hang in the large front windows that flood the room with light; the sushi bar is sleek and black—as are the chopsticks. The smell of teriyaki lured us into starting with yakitori, smoky and moist; besides the usual starters (gyoza, gomae, crab Rangoon) there’s soft shell crab and hamachi sashimi with jalapeño....

35th Ward candidate Carlos Rosa is taking on Rey Colon. The political website Aldertrack reported on Twitter this morning that we’re down to 217 candidates in the 50 aldermanic races (or, rather, in the 46 wards in which incumbents are actually being challenged). Should anyone wish to accuse Rosa of youthful idealism they’ll have to their advantage that he is indeed young: at election time he’ll be 26 years old....

Brothers & Sisters | ABC Brothers & Sisters When Monday, 9 PM On What About Brian, the hero loses his company, his life’s work, and all his money in between two commercial breaks. By the end of the first episode, he’s got a new job working for his estranged father; an episode later, he’s involved in an office romance with some absurdly hot babe who keeps making cryptic references to her married boyfriend–who turns out, an episode later, to be ....

This weekend Chicago DJ Jesse de la Peña resuscitates the Blue Groove Lounge, the weekly hip-hop party he hosted till it folded in 2003, to celebrate its 20th anniversary. Originally held Mondays at the Elbo Room, it sometimes showcased stars as big as Missy Elliott and the Jungle Brothers; in 1998 de la Peña moved it to the Funky Buddha Lounge after complaints from the residents of new condos nearby. The weekend-long anniversary blowout begins Fri 12/6 at Double Door (Blue Groove Lounge’s final home) with Roc Marciano and a lineup of locals that includes All Natural, Juice, Ang 13, and PNS....

Flame on I’ve always considered Fall Out Boy a pop-punk band with a hint of third-wave emo, and through the years the four-piece did a great job of turning its sound into a Flubber-like substance that could form all sorts of crazy shapes to include stylistic elements of other genres while retaining its original sugary and anthemic essence. Fall Out Boy made a big splash Monday after announcing its return from an “indefinite” hiatus with a new single, “My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark (Light Em Up),” from a forthcoming full-length called Save Rock And Roll....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Street vending has been intermittently under attack in Chicago for decades, but the latest crackdown began in 1991, when aldermen started to pass peddling “moratoriums” in various wards. Bernard Stone was the first, banning street vendors in the 50th Ward. His idea quickly caught on, and soon the streets were being cleared on the northwest and southwest sides. Then the moratoriums started popping up on the south side, as well as in more gentrified north-side areas like Lakeview and Lincoln Park....

PASS IT ON: CONNECTING DO-IT-YOURSELF CULTURE COLUMBIA COLLEGE A + D GALLERY Pass It On: Connecting Contemporary Do-It-Yourself Culture It’s All About Things The Micromentalists What’s your idea of utopia and how to reach it? If you agree with Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” idea, that capitalism and liberal democracy have triumphed, we’re there. If you’re a fan of Bruce Mau, the designer guru behind last fall’s “Massive Change” exhibit/trade show at the Museum of Contemporary Art and a participant in the corporate-visionary C6 Symposium at the Pritzker Pavilion in April, then we’re well on our way....

Bobby Conn‘s ambitious and fruitful weekly March residency at the Hideout—which featured percussionist Michael Zerang and folks from KK Rampage, Mucca Pazza, Joan of Arc, and Cave, among others—went so well that he’s decided to try to replicate the shows in sessions at his home studio! The Chicago avant-pop chameleon tells Gossip Wolf that he hopes to have a few albums’ worth of “immediate and close to the edge” recordings—including Bobby originals, covers of Tuxedo­moon, Roxy Music, and Os Mutantes, and tunes swiped from 60s naked-hippie musical Hair—available via Bandcamp as early as late May....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Larry Cohen is a walking encyclopedia of American pop culture: he created the cult sci-fi TV series The Invaders (1967-’68), scripted episodes of The Fugitive and Columbo, wrote and directed the low-budget horror favorites It’s Alive! (1974) and God Told Me To (1976), and more recently penned the screenplays for such high-concept thrillers as Phone Booth (2002) and Cellular (2004)....

Accanto Accanto shares a building and an owner with Lucky Vito’s Pizzeria—but that’s about all. With a separate entrance and brown-and-beige decor, the little restaurant exudes the fine-dining aesthetic of another era: polished tables set with look-of-leather runners, shiny silver show plates, and textured-gold hardcover menus. Chef Domenico Acampura is from Milan (where he was awarded a Michelin star), but his small menu is as much continental as Italian, with contemporary twists....

What About the NRA? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mick, I know you’re the City Hall reporter, but frankly, I’m shocked and appalled that the Reader itself wouldn’t bother to look into what’s really behind this whole issue and help open the public’s eyes about what’s really going on. The NRA and the gun industry are running rampant in DC and around the country, exempting themselves from federal laws that apply to everyone else (e....

Good thing he supposedly reformed it. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » He told us to think of it as investment. Instead of using those tax dollars for teachers or police, he vowed to shrewdly and strategically invest them in various projects that would transform the South Loop into a promised land of redevelopment yielding more property tax dollars for our schools and cops when the TIF expires in 2013....

In Harold Henderson’s piece about Uptown history [“The High Ground,” March 30]: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I have spent many hours in the Ravenswood collection at Sulzer Library, but never heard of this pond. Why would there be a nursery in this part of Ravenswood? In all the material about the Sunnyside Inn (which was at approximately 4441 N. Clark) there is never any mention of rowboats....

Last week, when the whole world was tanking, I dialed up Renaissance Society board member Joe Tabet to get a report on the benefit he chaired last month for the Hyde Park-based contemporary arts group—and an opinion on what the failing economy means for nonprofits. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The financial crisis will have donors snapping their purses shut, Tabet predicted. “I think 12 months from now it’ll be a lot more difficult than it is right now....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If you’re reading this right now, the world didn’t end yesterday as you had feared or hoped. Or maybe it did, and we’re all living in a postapocalyptic hell that looks strikingly similar to every day that came before this one. In honor of the end, I asked Sarah Frier—Reckless Records lifer and charming local weirdo—about the fate of music in a postapocalyptic land....

One overcast Thanksgiving Day in a Pennsylvania exurb, two little girls are abducted off a quiet neighborhood street in Prisoners, the exquisitely calibrated new thriller from French-Canadian director Denis Villeneuve, who, after the art-house success of his last film, Incendies (2010), an Oscar nominee for best foreign-language film, now moves into the English-speaking mainstream. Happily, he has not checked art at the door. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The movie’s stark themes—innocence and evil, faith and distrust, might and right—are set up in the opening sequence....

I wasn’t as impressed as some of my colleagues by Oren Moverman’s directing debut, The Messenger (2009), though Woody Harrelson was terrific as a steely marine who must drive around notifying military families that their loved ones are dead. Harrelson returns in Moverman’s second feature playing a similar character, a bullheaded LAPD officer whose long career with the force is unraveling amid a succession of brutality complaints, and although the role offers the same macho quotient as the earlier one, it’s counterbalanced in this case by funny, observant scenes of his gyno-centric home life....

Annie Arnoult Beserra, head of Striding Lion Performance Group, fell in love with Valeska Gert in 2005, when, as a grad school student, she saw recently released archival footage of Gert’s dance solos. “She was so raw and riddled and vibrant,” Beserra says. “There was such life in her embodiment of horrors.” Born in 1892 in Berlin, dancer-writer-composer-singer-actress Gert was blacklisted by the early 1930s, for the crime of being a Jew making avant-garde art....