Unlike many comics, Los Angeles’s Brent Weinbach isn’t interested in endearing himself to an audience. On his latest album, the hysterical Mostly Live (ASpecialThing), he doesn’t bother to introduce himself, or ask the audience how they’re feeling, or engage in any sort of pleasantries whatsoever. Instead, he launches instantly into character, delivering a sprawling monologue in an indecipherable accent—it sort of sounds like a mix of Mexican and Middle Eastern, with a little New England frat boy—on the supposed dangers of performing oral sex on an unshaven woman....

Out of circulation for decades, Howard Brookner’s documentary Burroughs (1983) is the most intimate and revealing screen portrait of the legendary experimental writer, which is a real distinction given how often his life has been treated in dramas (Beat, Naked Lunch, On the Road, Kill Your Darlings) and documentaries (William S. Burroughs: A Man Within, The Beat Hotel, and others too numerous to list). Brookner began the project in 1978 as a 20-minute thesis film at New York University (his classmate Jim Jarmusch served as sound man) and later expanded it to feature length, following Burroughs to his native Saint Louis and to London (where he captured him in conversation with painter Francis Bacon)....

In Life of Pi, Yann Martel describes a floating island of vegetation with its own ecosystem that could be boarded and had animals living on it out in the middle of the ocean. It seems far-fetched, but does anything like this exist? —Tim M., UK Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Floating islands aren’t limited to swamps—Ohio has its famous Cranberry Bog of Buckeye Lake, a 50-acre mass of moss formed when the floor of a valley that was flooded to create a canal reservoir in the 1830s broke loose and floated to the surface....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I managed to wake up early enough to order a couple Golden Tickets to DLD 2009 online–they all sold out in roughly four hours–and yesterday they finally arrived in the mail. (Dark Lord Day is April 25 this year.) I figure everybody else got theirs at about the same time, because almost immediately it became clear that FFF’s antiscalping efforts had only displaced the problem: the $10 tickets started showing up on Craigslist for as much as $150....

Music Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Show: Yakuza On the new Of Seismic Consequence, recorded here in town with Sanford Parker, local progressive-metal band Yakuza “careens recklessly between brutality and beauty, marrying psychedelic space-rock to enough jet-engine power to send the whole package hurtling straight into a supernova—and out the other side unscathed,” writes Monica Kendrick. The band’s set at this release party will include the entire album, top to bottom....

River North’s Gallery Bar is an art gallery-slash-street food concept that specializes in Mexi-Asian-Caribbean-Polynesian fusion wraps called “Bonzai” and also serves a large selection of beer cocktails. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Alright. That sentence was probably a little stomach-churny for anyone with a low tolerance for the sort of unabashed trendiness and worldly urbanism that that simultaneously makes restaurants (and bars and clubs) into parodies of themselves and attracts a clientele that’s too busy watching The Bachelorette or whatever to realize it’s supposed to be rolling its eyes....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Chicago Public Radio has announced its plans for its fiscal year beginning July 1, and they involve some cuts. Hello Beautiful, the Sunday morning arts program launched by former staffer Edward Lifson, is to be “suspended,” and Right Now, a new afternoon talk show hosted by Richard Steele, has been shelved. Daniel Ash, executive vice president of strategic communications, said today that personnel associated with those programs will be reassigned and in addition that programming vice president Ron Jones announced this week that he’s leaving the station “to look for a new adventure....

Gossip Wolf was fond of prowling (and dancing) at Logan Square 4 AM bar the Owl even before it started hosting free rock shows in its ample back room—and in the past month alone it’s booked a slew of local acts worth hooting about, including Bloodiest, Basic Cable, and Bitchin Bajas. On Wed 6/12, legendary New York psych-groove outfit Silver Apples will play a rare live set, and the Owl has painted up a batch of cool silver plastic apples to serve as invites and dropped them off at record stores, including Reckless in Wicker Park, Permanent, Logan Hardware, and Saki....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Well hell yeah: Wired’s Eliot Van Buskirk is reporting that webcasters are catching a major break from the egregious ruling handed down by the Library of Congress’s Copyright Royalty Board, which would’ve bankrupted most Internet radio providers and essentially shuttered the whole webcasting business for at least a few years. The public response to this unfair development has been big enough to get the generally techno-phobic U....

“Graduate students at all institutions can organize on their campuses without recourse to the NLRB.” In the meantime, we were slightly concerned that folks might misinterpret the current legal playing field and jump to conclusions that there was no possibility for graduate labor organizing. At present, the NLRB in no way bans student organizing. It has refused to recognize or enforce any collective bargaining rights on behalf of graduate student unions at private universities, but graduate students at all institutions can organize on their campuses without recourse to the NLRB....

Dear struggling young American playwright, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Davis sets her play in northern California’s isolated Anderson Valley in 1955. We know it’s 1955 because news of Emmett Till’s murder is in the current issue of Jet magazine. We know it’s Anderson Valley because Davis’s characters utter bits of Boontling, a highly idiosyncratic dialect peculiar to the region. Though we’re well into the buttoned-up Eisenhower era, the town’s whorehouse is so highly respected that Schoolch, the local schoolteacher, can pass his days sipping tea with the establishment’s madame, Madame, and still keep his job....

As part of his long-running work in progress Room Pieces, New York sound artist Michael J. Schumacher creates immersive computer-driven audio installations tailored to the dimensions and contents of the spaces they occupy. Once set in motion, a program of Schumacher’s design uses an elaborate set of algorithms to control in real time any number of what he calls “sound modules”–more specifically, “simple sine tones, both sustained and articulated, instrumental sounds, synthesized sounds, field recordings, and sounds culled from various sources like the World Wide Web, films and CDs....

It’s difficult to think of a more influential bad writer than Edgar Allan Poe. He moved Gothic romance from the faraway castle to the house next door, replacing the terrors of the sublime with the neurasthenic spasms of the diseased modern imagination. While Emerson was busy championing pragmatism, Poe zeroed in on everything we routinely deny in ourselves: the perversions, degradations, and deformities Harold Bloom calls “the uncanny unanimity in our repressions....

Nightwood, the new Pilsen venture from the Lula talent trust of Jason Hammel, Amalea Tshilds, and chef Jason Vincent, in tandem with designer Kevin Heisner and Matt Eisler (Bar DeVille, etc), has had the loyal Lulaphile base licking its lips for months. When Hammel finally posted news of its opening on May 26, it practically took over my Facebook feed. This place could serve stale Cheetos and still have ’em lined up down Halsted....

When I ask Mark Weglarz, proprietor of Metal Haven, when he decided to shut down his store—not only one of Chicago’s most singular music retailers but probably one of the best heavy-metal record shops in the world—he pauses for a moment. Then he says: 7 PM on October 13. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Weglarz seems remarkably sanguine about the situation. Metal Haven is so clearly a labor of love for him that I’d expect him to be crushed—instead he’s cracking jokes about the imminent death of a business he founded in 1999 and has subsidized since 2002 with a downtown job running what he calls a “little Kinko’s within an office....

In his book The Theatre of the Absurd, Martin Esslin notes that during the first performance of The Bald Soprano in 1950, playwright Eugene Ionesco was “amazed to hear the audience laugh at what he considered a tragic spectacle of human life reduced to passionless automatism through bourgeois convention and the fossilization of language.” Sean Graney’s wry current staging, a tribute to the Hypocrites’ inaugural production ten years ago, won’t inspire any such confusion....

He’ll never admit it, but Tim Kinsella helped invent what we now know (and deride) as emo in 1989, when he was all of 14. The basement band he started in Wheeling, Illinois, with his brother, drummer Mike Kinsella, and two friends—guitarist Victor Villareal and bassist Sam Zurick—was a flash of furiously inspired kid genius, too artful and poppy to be properly called postpunk, and he fronted it like a wriggling postpubescent shaman....

In late September an unsolicited package arrived at the Atlanta home of writer, graphic designer, and indie-scene gadfly Henry Owings, whose endeavors range from the long-running zine Chunklet to Grammy-winning design work for Revenant Records’ 2001 Charley Patton box set. The package was from Chris Thomson, most recently singer for Chicago’s Red Eyed Legends but best known for fronting a series of D.C. posthardcore bands, among them Circus Lupus, the Monorchid, and Skull Kontrol....

The boutique wine stores that have proliferated in Chicago over the past half dozen years don’t offer the kind of selection as, say, Binny’s. But their owners and managers have personally tasted every wine they stock. When we checked in with some of them about the latest in summer wines, we learned that these retailers are experiencing “downward pressure” on prices from customers, which they think has made people more open to trying new varietals, especially whites and rosés....

It’s December, which means it’s time for me, as a dutiful blogger, critic, and self-appointed cultural arbiter, to put together my best-of lists. I need to listen to that Raekwon album again to confirm that I really do think exactly the same thing everyone else thinks. I need to check back in with that Mariah Carey album to make sure I really do think exactly the opposite of what everyone else thinks....