On July 26, the New York Times published an item announcing the marriage of 66-year-old architect David Webster to Larry Kramer, a 78-year-old author. The bland, pro forma piece noted that the ceremony took place at NYU Langone Medical Center, “where Mr. Kramer was recovering from surgery.” (The wedding date had been set a few weeks before a bowel flare-up required Kramer’s hospitalization.) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Though rooted in medicine and politics, The Normal Heart is essentially a family drama—a genre that’s been a staple of American theater from O’Neill to Hansberry to August Wilson....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “When (and I do mean when) Senator Obama wins, his Senate seat will be left vacant,” Jackson says in the e-mail. “While rumors are swirling about who will be appointed to fill this slot, people are taking notice of the change we’ve created right here in the 2nd Congressional District. … As a national co-chair of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, I’ve been working hard to generate support and enthusiasm for our Democratic nominee and our party....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tonight the New Fracture Quartet, a newish ensemble led by drummer Tim Daisy (pictured), celebrates the release of its debut album 1,000 Lights (on the Polish Multikulti imprint) with a performance at the Hideout. Unfortunately, as Daisy informs me, the album art isn’t done–meaning there isn’t yet a tangible release to celebrate. But I’ve heard the recording, and the band’s music sounds promising enough that I don’t need a special occasion to check them out....

Jerald Walker teaches English lit and creative writing at Bridgewater State College in Massachusetts, but his memoir, Street Shadows, is a south-side Chicago tale through and through—real deal, as some say below Cermak, unspun in its tracking of the author’s circular path from hope to despair and then back to hope again. Street Shadows is Walker’s homage to second chances, recounting how he took a wayward turn in youth and still found his way as an adult, discovering opportunity in Chicago....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It no longer makes much sense to liken a Pelican concert to a high-decibel microtonal drone installation, because these days the band’s songs rely more on badass riffs than on skull-softening volume and brain-effacing repetition. They continue to use some of both, though, as Kevin Warwick points out in his preview of the band’s Wednesday show at Bottom Lounge: the new Forever Becoming, their first long-player in four years, “combines the drive and hooks of Pelican’s late career with the awesome hugeness of its earliest material....

Leor Galil Le Sphinxx My Thursday afternoon has been off to a slow start partially because I went to sleep last night feeling a little ill and needed some time to recuperate, partially because of the usual showcase scheduling snafus. I spent a good chunk of time waiting to take in a set from Bulgarian-German rapper Dena, whose set ended up getting delayed nearly an hour. Fortunately the time wasn’t totally wasted, as I stumbled upon a set by Brooklyn’s Le Sphinxx, whose music sounds like darkwave derivative of Grimes; despite lacking any great sound or style, their stage show included a dancer wearing a creepy crescent-moon mask who twirled about in a way that captured my attention for at least a few minutes....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I was already feeling burnt out on rock lit by the time Continuum started publishing their 33 1/3 series, so it took me a long time to connect with it. Plus Loveless didn’t change my life, and I’d like to never read another word about Pet Sounds. As the series has evolved, though, it’s drawn me in–In the Aeroplane Over the Sea was an interesting case study on the relationship between artist and fan, and Paul’s Boutique had some funny stories about the Beastie Boys being messed up on drugs....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Said the report, “Unpaid interns miss out on wages and employment benefits, but they can also find themselves in ‘legal limbo’ when it comes to civil rights, according to law professor and intern labor rights advocate David Yamada. The O’Connor decision (the leading ruling on the matter, according to Yamada) held that because they don’t get a paycheck, unpaid interns are not ’employees’ under the Civil Rights Act—and thus, they’re not protected....

Chloe Riley Jorge Mujica wants you to remember his name. And his face. And that he wants to raise the minimum wage to $15. Longtime activist Jorge Mujica wants you to know he’s a socialist. Not that it really matters from a voting perspective, as aldermanic elections are nonpartisan, but because—according to Mujica—socialism means fighting for the working man, something he says hasn’t happened for a long time in the 25th Ward....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve spent the past several days listening to Of Montreal’s new album, Lousy With Sylvianbriar, on repeat and just really enjoying that principal member Kevin Barnes gave up the Prince ghost and decided to make some more charming, jangly 60s pop via Athens, Georgia, circa the late 90s. All the old influences are there: David Bowie, Ray Davies. Conspicuously absent, however, are the rest of the band’s longtime members, including Bryan Poole (aka the Late B....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’m a big fan of Bandcamp—it’s got a simple, clean, and inviting interface, which makes combing through its growing catalog a pleasure. True, it has its drawbacks, particularly when it comes to sifting through the site’s tags to try and discover new music, but that’s largely due just to the massive amount of new albums, EPs, and singles that get uploaded....

Do you have some time on your hands? I hope so, because today’s 12 O’Clock Track easily ranks as the longest one the Reader has ever offered up, clocking in at one hour, ten minutes, and 21 seconds. That’s only about a fourth of the total duration of a stunning new recording of November, a protominimalist masterpiece written by Dennis Johnson, a cohort of composers like La Monte Young, Terry Riley, and Terry Jennings at UCLA in the late 50s....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve been asleep at the wheel about the new album by excellent Bay Area instrumental quartet Tussle. The group’s new Tempest (Smalltown Supersound) was released last week after several delays, but despite PR clogging my inbox about its impending arrival over the past few months, this exciting news only registered in my even more clogged brain after I read Jon Caramanica’s positive review in this Sunday’s New York Times....

QI recently discovered that my boyfriend of seven months and I have opposing viewpoints on the whole “life begins at conception” issue. He’s not a crazy zealot, but he is strongly against abortion. And while he won’t go so far as to say abortion should be banned, he does believe in the whole “personhood” concept, i.e., that a fetus—from the moment of conception—is a person with the same rights as any other person....

Two images of Graves’s father, Bill A Body Without Organs, my favorite thing I’ve seen so far at this year’s Chicago Underground Film Festival, is something of a challenge to the spectator’s empathy. Stephen Graves’s experimental documentary about his parents introduces the subjects in discomforting ways, forcing audiences to accept them at their most vulnerable before coming to admire their strengths. Graves’s father, Bill, is a former doctor who needed to have his colon and parts of his intestines removed in 1997 as the result of a rare medical condition....

The south side isn’t exactly starved for art cinema—the University of Chicago is host to not only Doc Films but UC Film Studies Center’s weekly programs at Logan Center for the Arts, and Beverly Arts Center has weekly 35-millimeter screenings of independent features—but outside Hyde Park there’s a real shortage of alternative fare. Founded by the artist Theaster Gates and run by longtime Chicago programmer and critic Michael W. Phillips Jr....

facebook.com/moviessidefilmfestival musicboxtheatre.com Neither Music Box nor Movieside Film Festival will comment on why they ended their seven-year partnership presenting the annual Music Box Massacre, a wildly popular 24-hour horror marathon in the weeks leading up to Halloween. Last October the event mysteriously split into two rival marathons on successive weekends: first the Music Box of Horrors and then, over at the Portage, the Massacre. Both followed the same format of screening movies in chronological order, from the silent era into the present, with plenty of vintage trailers and personal appearances along the way, and the film selection for each was excellent....

If you chose to dwell on it, the rock-meets-church decor of celebrichef Graham Elliot’s third spot, Graham Elliot Bistro, could be just as distracting as the television-and-Twitter persona of its founder. There’s a Marshall stack host stand, menus taped to discount-bin LPs, and votive candles that pay equal homage to Grant Achatz and Eddie Vedder, Julia Child and Henry Rollins. Not enough people are weary of a chef who cultivates overearnest associations with rock and roll as a branding strategy when all he really needs to do is cook something good—or direct his cooks to....

Courtesy of Air Balloon Tapes’ Bandcamp This cat approves of Air Balloon Tapes’ first compilation. Local microlabel Air Balloon Tapes emerged last month with a distinct desire to give back to the DIY community. Inspired by indie-pop compilations from defunct UK label Sarah Records, which put out a 23-track collection in 1990 called Air Balloon Road, the team behind Air Balloon Tapes hope to showcase a range of underground acts through monthly cassette releases, and a portion of the proceeds benefit DIY spaces....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Show: Fiery Furnaces “I’m Going Away might be my favorite Fiery Furnaces album yet,” writes Miles Raymer. “The Friedberger sibs have located the perfect balance point between their passion for noodly complication and their love for smooth-edged AOR pop, creating a strange synergy from a combination that might seem antithetical on its surface.” Dinner: Yoshi’s Cafe “Long before the name Yoshi was inextricably linked in the public mind with Nintendo, Yoshi’s restaurant was ground zero during Chicago’s early forays into fusion cuisine, merging culinary traditions from all over the planet,” writes David Hammond....