Matt Harmon has a lot on his plate. The 25-year-old DIY musician and concert organizer is the bassist in mathy screamo quintet Suffix and plays guitar and sings for a punk trio called Cloud Mouth, which is about to drop a new six-song 12-inch, That Ghost Is Always With Me (Ice Age), and on July 2 will embark on a monthlong tour of the eastern U.S. He and his younger brother John, who plays bass in Cloud Mouth, also run a newish Logan Square venue called Strangelight, which will host an ambitious indie record fair this Saturday, June 26, featuring more than 40 midwestern labels, crafters, and zine makers....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But it might be an advantage if you, like Ellis, are a practicing lawyer (he was the house prosecutor during Rod Blagojevich’s impeachment trial) and are running for appellate court judge next spring. “Being a lawyer means that elected officials don’t piss you off,” he jokes. davidellis.com David Ellis In this case, Jason, the logical investigator, almost deliberately fails to add up a large number of factors—a knee injury plus bad dreams and a dry mouth and itchy hands plus an uncharacteristically foggy brain and lack of interest in work plus a strange devotion to a tin of Altoids (to the point that he leaves the bed of a beautiful woman in the middle of the night and takes a cab across the city to get back home)—and conclude that he’s become addicted to OxyContin, which his doctor had prescribed during his knee surgery....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There are no sofas for sale at SOFA Chicago, also known as Sculptural Objects Functional Art + Design, which opens today at Navy Pier. There is, however, a lot of decorative art of the sort you see in the lobbies of expensive hotels or in photos in high-end interior decorating magazines. If you have a large amount of disposable income, it’s a good place to start your holiday shopping, especially for the people on your list who already have everything....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On Wednesday Allium, chef Kevin Hickey’s redo of Seasons, opened in the Four Seasons Hotel Chicago, with an intriguing seasonal menu divided into the categories “Smaller,” “Bigger,” “Mine,” and “From the Meat Locker.” The result is pricing ranging from $8 for apple-celeriac soup to $62 for a 14-ounce beef tenderloin chop, with many in the first two categories running at around $15....

This changed somewhat this past fall when I took Professor Anton Ford’s lecture class “Justice,” which focused exclusively on the ethical writings of Plato, Aristotle, and Kant. I immediately noted a few of Ford’s distinguishing characteristics: the thick ocular frames of an architect, the humorous gesticulations of Jerry Seinfeld, and the doughnutphilia of Homer Simpson. “If one finds a box of doughnuts in a hallway, is she forced to eat them, doughnuts being unmistakably delicious?...

In 1999, when Jiba Molei Anderson set out to self-publish his Afrocentric superhero comic The Horsemen, he knew the strikes against him. “I’m a black-owned, independent company doing a comic book about seven African and African-American characters,” he says. “I should have failed.” The comic book industry hasn’t been kind to African-American characters and creators, stereotyping the former and marginalizing the latter. There’s been intermittent progress since the 1990s, with the success of black heroes like Spawn and Blade and the founding of the Milestone imprint (which DC Comics recently revived) by a group of black artists....

Good news for aging musicians: according to a new study, people who play instruments seem to experience less of certain types of hearing loss as they get older. Researchers say that while the more musically inclined of us will still lose our ability to discern tones below certain volume (what’s technically known as our “pure tone threshold”) the same as anyone else, we’re supposed to retain certain listening skills like “speech-in-noise,” which in less technical terms simply means the ability to make out what people are saying in situations with lots of environmental noise, like cocktail parties and such....

As Budd’s dish gets passed around (in the end, he decided against plating each portion individually), he describes it: flatiron steak cooked sous vide and finished on the grill, topped with a chimichurri sauce. He might have done more, he says, but he ran short on time. Someone jokes that sous vide is usually her go-to method, too, when time is running short (the technique involves slow-cooking food in a water bath at the desired final temperature)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Decades before Death Grips ditched their own shows and Lady Gaga parodied her own celebrity, Bay Area collective Negativland invented the pop prank art form, basing an album on the frenzied media hoax that surrounded their song “Christianity is Stupid,” and then deliberately infringing copyright on their sarcastic record U2 to prompt a lawsuit with Island Records just to make an argument about fair use and sampling....

If I were playing by the usual rules, the contenders for my best of 2007 list would be drawn from the titles only millionaires can afford to promote. In that case, I would say 2007 was the worst year for new movies I could remember. But I’d be fudging, because I didn’t come close to seeing all the contenders. Yet when it comes to the list of movies making their Chicago premieres, 2007 may be the best year I can remember....

The Chicago Film Archives vault is located in a room of a beige, nondescript former warehouse on 18th Street in Pilsen. The Archives’ physical archive, its trove of celluloid materials and related ephemera, numbers more than 20,000 items that offer a diverse cultural record of the midwest throughout the 20th century. Film cans line rows of tightly packed metal shelves that are icy to the touch; in keeping with professional archival standards, the humidity never goes above 40 percent and the temperature never exceeds 50 degrees....

One chilly Wisconsin evening in 2007, business consultant Ani Poddar walked into the Madison outpost of the Texas-based gelateria chain Paciugo with his wife and spotted a flavor called pepe nero—black pepper and olive oil. Poddar, who’d emigrated from India in 1998 to study manufacturing systems and industrial engineering at the University of Wisconsin, was a man who took his sweets very seriously, and he couldn’t believe what he was seeing....

Thursday23 Cyrus Chestnut TrioSleepovers, Bored Games Friday24 Cyrus Chestnut Trio Saturday25 Cyrus Chestnut TrioPaul Di’Anno Sunday26 Cyrus Chestnut TrioMacabre Monday27 Mustard Plug Wednesday27 James ChanceDKV TrioDi Wu SLEEPOVERS, BORED GAMES I’m a sucker for a song with a title that includes the name of the band who wrote it. Maybe it’s the neat tautology—in this respect the obvious world champ is hardcore band Talk Is Poison, who included the track “Talk Is Poison” on their EP Talk Is Poison—or maybe it’s just because I think that, like the Monkees and the Banana Splits, every group should have a theme song....

How should America’s theater community respond to humanitarian crises on the other side of the planet? One obvious answer: Just like the rest of us. They can donate to relief agencies, pressure political leaders, stay informed—and, especially since so much of our political art consists of smug, self-righteous choir preaching, leave it at that. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That said, Northlight’s Eclipsed and TimeLine’s In Darfur don’t have a lot other than topicality and a continent in common....

Calamity West has two things that, in a just and sensible world, would lead inevitably to success: a pen name to give Lemony Snicket a run for his money and a knack for drama that makes her one of the best playwrights in Chicago. Or maybe the country. Or the universe. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Common Hatred sounds like somebody’s undergrad thesis project: An overt homage to Chekhov, the script borrows key plot points and relationships from all of the Russian master’s major plays....

In the 40 years I’ve lived in Chicago, the city has asserted itself in a number of areas, some of them surprising. Its theater is now world class, and so is its fine dining. People flock from across the country to attend its music festivals. It claims important dance companies. In architecture, higher education, medicine, and finance, it’s more than held its ground. A lot of midwestern American cities have been told so often that they’re losers they believe it....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The photo is the one taken December 3 of Ki-Suck Han an instant before a subway train struck and killed him in New York City. A drifter had pushed him onto the track, and in the few seconds before the train arrived no one stepped forward to try to lift him back onto the platform. In the eyes of journalists, the front page raised fundamental questions about journalistic ethics—the photographer’s and the newspaper’s....

The Argentine label ZZK has earned its reputation as the pioneering factory of electro-cumbia music, adapting the ubiquitous Colombian folk and pop style for usage in global bass culture. With the release of Viene de Mi, the imprint shakes up its aesthetic a bit—La Yegros is a singer, and while there are plenty of electronic flourishes and beats on the album (many courtesy of producer Gaby Kerpel, who’s recorded for ZKK as King Coya), it delivers a much more conventional, song-oriented approach than what the label is known for....

Few people I know saw Patrick Wang’s languid drama In the Family when it screened at the Music Box in April, probably because it runs close to three hours. The “slow cinema” movement may be a cause celebre for cinephiles, and civilians may find the idea of long, studious takes intriguing, but few of them will actually pull the trigger on a three-hour movie unless it’s really something special. In the Family is extraordinary, and it casts a spell on the big screen that can’t be reproduced in your living room....

AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin According to pundits, Obama’s connection to Chicago explains everything. King George III was no Hitler or Stalin, but because revolutions are glorified when they succeed we happily remember ours as a triumph over tyranny. That set a low bar for tyranny, and we still live with it. David Brooks began his column in last Friday’s New York Times with a quote from Clinton Rossiter comparing government to fire: “Under control, it is the most useful of servants; out of control, it is a ravaging tyrant....