The Goodman’s been doing a great job of putting diverse ethnic voices onstage. Last season ended with Boleros for the Disenchanted, José Rivera’s sweet, sad look at the consequences of leaving Puerto Rico for the American mainland. Just before that came Ghostwritten, Naomi Iizuka’s fairy-tale treatment of the tangled human—and culinary—relations between the United States and Vietnam. And last November there was Ruined, a devastating piece of work by African-American writer Lynn Nottage about walking casualties of the permanent war in the Democratic Republic of Congo....

Adapted from a novel by Chicagoan Sam Greenlee, The Spook Who Sat By the Door (1973) stands as one of the most unlikely movies ever made in America and by far the smartest, most daring of the blaxploitation films. The protagonist, a social worker recruited by the CIA as a token black, uses his espionage training to launch a revolution on the south side. Producer-director Ivan Dixon was denied shooting permits by the city and had to stage the climactic riot sequence in Gary....

They come from far-off lands like New York, LA, and Toronto, singly and in groups, a surprisingly large number of them wearing thin, gold nose rings. And since the groups are either all or pretty much all made up of women they have names like Clam Bake (Wed 6/6, 10 PM), Ladystache (Fri 6/8, 9 PM), Wisesnatch (Wed 6/6, 9 PM), and Stacked (Sat 6/9, 7 PM). In what may be a canny move or a big mistake, Stage 773 has picked the week before the vast, flashy TBS Just for Laughs comedy extravaganza to put on the first Chicago Women’s Funny Festival—a five-day convocation of 400 stand-ups, improvisers, and sketch troupe members presenting 66 shows....

Ryan Dickie Helado Negro, aka Roberto Carlos Lange The shows we’ve written up for Soundboard over the next few days happen to cluster on Wednesday, but live music in Chicago never stops. Tonight, for instance, you can catch up with two long-running residencies—Robbie Fulks at the Hideout, who’ll be having his way with songs by Jerry Reed and Lou Reed, and the Extraordinary Popular Delusions at Beat Kitchen, with reedist Edward Wilkerson Jr....

When Justin Howard steps from the wings to take center stage at Metro, he looks like he’s walked out of a poster charting the evolution of man—unkempt, hairy, and dressed in what appear to be hides and furs, he’d fit in a step or two to the left of Homo sapiens. The 28-year-old bearded barbarian is known in the demimonde of U.S. Air Guitar as Nordic Thunder, and though his ax is imaginary, the rock-god reception he draws from the crowd is real....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One of the best parts about living in Kalamazoo—you might be surprised, but there are actual nice things about living there—is Western Michigan University’s radio station, WIDR. And one of the best things on WIDR is the long-running show SwaG!, an hour of high weirdness hosted by the enigmatic Bat Guano, a man obsessed with archaic kitsch, bizarre sonic oddities, psychedelic weirdness, noise, and surf guitars....

Did Timothy Douglas really serve as artistic director of Remy Bumppo Theatre? Or did I just dream it? The guy’s tenure went by so fast—ending in January, after he’d spent only six months in the job. The Iceman Cometh, Goodman Theatre Robert Falls revisited the Eugene O’Neill classic he first staged in 1990—only this time he had Nathan Lane playing Hickey, the hail-fellow salesman with a big thirst and a dark secret....

See our reviews and live coverage of the bands playing on: Saturday · Sunday · Afterparties Pitchfork main » Think aloofness can be attractive? I say yes, because Frankie Rose‘s Interstellar (Slumberland) is the musical equivalent of two girls perched at the end of the bar in silence, waiting for you to buy each of them a gin and tonic so they can go back to ignoring everything but their iPhones....

In Keith Huff’s original, ambitious new one-act, two University of Chicago undergrads learn to love, leave, and lash out. As they flirt, then fall for each other, they cite Socrates, bash Milton Friedman, and ruminate on free will and determinism. But ultimately their romance lacks credibility because the story is riddled with extreme occurrences and circumstances: mental illness, violent crime, unwanted pregnancy, and other hard-hitting stuff. The drama doesn’t so much build as pile up....

Last June, with a good deal of fanfare, the Chicago Convention and Tourism Bureau announced a bold new advertising campaign for the city. Bankrolled with money from a recently doubled tax rate on cab and bus rides from the airports, the bureau had put together a $6 million program that would open Chicago tourism offices overseas, establish a sports commission, and be the first “true branding effort,” promoting Chicago as a “global visitor destination....

The Chef: B.K. Park (Arami)The Challenger: Jason Vincent (Nightwood)The Ingredient: Chufa Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » B.K. Park, who’d never worked with chufas, couldn’t find them locally, so he ordered them from Spain; they arrived at his Ukrainian Village restaurant looking a little like small, withered almonds. Park originally wanted to grind them into a powder, but that didn’t work. So he decided to stick with what he knows best: “I’m going to make sushi with it,” he said....

Andreas Bohnenstengel Kim Dotcom On Saturday, exactly a year after a Justice Department raid shut down the file-locker service Megaupload (which had been megapopular with intellectual property scofflaws) the site’s flamboyant founder Kim Dotcom unveiled a new service simply called Mega that combines cloud-based file storage (not unlike what Megaupload offered) with the promise of a robust encryption scheme. The debut has had the tech media beside itself, which its typically outlandish launch party in New Zealand has only amplified, and presumably pirates who missed the good old days of being able to find an illicit Megaupload link to pretty much any album or film you could ever want were excited too....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As you may already know, there was some controversy surrounding the A$AP Rocky show that went down at the House of Blues last night. HOB had kicked local rap group L.E.P. Bogus Boys off the bill, citing the concerns of “local authorities,” and the Chicago Police Department flatly denied any role. Then HOB’s parent company released a statement taking responsibility for the situation and backing up the CPD’s claims of noninvolvement—from what I can tell, the whole thing can be blamed on an HOB talent buyer inventing the “local authorities” angle out of whole cloth in order to weasel out of booking a local rap group after the fiasco at the Chief Keef concert at the Congress Theater....

“Note to D’Angelo: It’s only food, dude (dood). Get over yourself!” Mark Yacko Nancy Ward Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Wow, Albert D’Angelo is living on a different planet. It’s good that he’s way out on the lake so he doesn’t have to mingle with the riffraff of Chicago. Bragging about calling the INS on “territorial” line cooks and what other animals you can force feed for big livers definitely sounds like a stereotype of the 24-year-old son of a NYSE trader....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The local instrumental duo of guitarist Benjamin Mjolsness (formerly of Mass Shivers) and keyboardist/electronics guy Jonathan Krohn, aka Male, rarely perform or record without a complement of players from the local jazz and improv scene—it looks like what they do is come up with ideas and then enlist some great musicians to help realize them. Male’s modus operandi is to record amorphous, drifting tracks as a duo, then bring in folks like vibist Jason Adasiewicz, cornetist Josh Berman, and guitarist Todd Mattei to improvise over them in real time, with no subsequent edits....

As we approach the midpoint of Mayor Emanuel’s first term, I think I’ve discovered one of his greatest legacies to Chicago, right up there with dismantling public education and making Mayor Daley’s god-awful parking meter deal even worse. Meanwhile he’s invented one of the great FOIA dodges of all time: I’d give you the stuff you want, but we threw it out. CPS responded that “the district does not maintain any documents responsive to your request....

I read your cover article on the city council with great interest [“Your City Council,” June 15], as I had just attended Wednesday’s City Council meeting, my first in 15 years. I think every citizen should go and observe our city at work. The first order of the day was the honorary recognition of outstanding citizens: first a city policeman who saved the lives of two fire victims, next a fire captain for being a good captain, then a number of restaurateurs who had received an industry award....

QI’m a 23-year-old guy and I have been dating my 21-year-old girlfriend for about two years. We did the long-distance thing for a year, and after she graduated she moved from the east coast to the midwest to be with me while I finish my degree. Everything was great until she moved in with me. She has a 9-to-5 job and pays her bills. After work, though, all she wants to do is get high, drink, and watch TV....

NALEDGE “I’m in Chicago Bitch” doesn’t dig any deeper than the original, but it dials down the vapid glitz in favor of a gritty, low-budget sensibility—instead of rhymes about exclusive beaches and posh hotels, we get a description of a hot weekend that goes, “Drink all day/ Juke all night/ Go get some tacos/ And fuck till the morning light.” Halfway through the Million Dollar Mano remix of the track, the original’s beat and burbling 303 bass line both drop out—not coincidentally right in time for a loop of Naledge’s shout-out to “Mano beats”—and then get replaced by an acid-tinged blast of hard, body-jacking house....

Architecture was booming in Chicago in 1927: art deco monuments like the Palmolive Building, the Medinah Athletic Club (now the InterContinental Chicago hotel), and the Pittsfield Building were going up downtown, while in Grant Park, the city’s “front yard,” Kate Sturges Buckingham was honoring the memory of her brother Clarence with a modest 133-jet fountain. And in Old Town, a couple of art-school dropouts were carving a wheezy Victorian mansion into artists’ studios....