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friday5 cJohn Sharp, Ani kavafian, Jorge Federico Osorio, Desiree Ruhstrat, and Michael Strauss Georg Solti hired cellist John Sharp in 1986, when Sharp was only 27, making him one of the youngest musicians ever appointed to a Chicago Symphony Orchestra principal chair. As a soloist with the orchestra he’s performed Dvorak’s Cello Concerto and Beethoven’s Triple Concerto, with Itzhak Perlman and Daniel Barenboim. He consistently plays his section’s solos with elegant phrasing and a gorgeous tone, and he has a remarkable ability to pick up a musical line from an unrelated instrument such as the clarinet and match its sound–all qualities essential to great chamber music making....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s a little strange that in the midst of a recession and at a time when industries and individuals have been forced to do more with less, society seems poised to renounce our increasingly relentless pace—you know, the one that leads to immeasurable fulfillment and endless misery. I wish that for this iteration of our Variations on a Theme series, we as a staff could afford to experiment with a week—just one week—of “traditional” work-life balance....

This Belgrade-based family act operates under an ambitious code of simplicity: Zoran Starcevic and his two sons, Nikola and Zeljko, seem to have made it their project to condense the entire Balkan musical tradition into a repertoire that can be played by six hands on three guitars. All classically trained and all exuding an audible affection for rock, blues, pop, and jazz–particularly the hot jazz of Reinhardt and Grappelli–the Starcevic boys take a microcosmic approach to their original compositions as well....

The other night I had dinner at a new restaurant where literally every single review of it that I can find online uses the word “hipster” at least twice. Befitting its reputation for hipness, the soundtrack was an intriguing mix of electronic music that I didn’t recognize, including an electro-leaning remix of Wayne Wonder’s 2003 single “No Letting Go.” The remix was pretty cool but it also struck me as mostly pointless since the original is based on the Diwali riddim, which is one of the best beats ever made....

Q I have a question regarding pornography usage and browser histories. As a matter of courtesy to my wife (and anyone else who may use our devices), I always clear the browser history on whatever device (computer/iPad) I may have used to view pornography. I’ve always just assumed that she doesn’t want to see “Teen Anal Adventures” or “Lifestyles of the Deep and Fisted” when she logs on to the browser history....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Harris wrote four novels from the persona of Henry Wiggen, a pitcher with the New York Mammoths, a team modeled — explicitly in the movies — on the Yankees. To the end, Harris was best known for the 1973 film, Bang the Drum Slowly, for which he also wrote the script, but the reason it made a good and lasting movie (aside from the cast, which included Michael Moriarty, Robert De Niro, and Vincent Gardenia) is also the reason it’s not his best book....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Harrower sets Kill the Old Torture Their Young in his native Scotland, but Kathryn Walsh’s production moves the action to America—and since a copy of Time Out Chicago shows up onstage, you can guess where in America we’re supposed to be. The city is presented as a prominent character: hometown boy Robert Malloch, now a successful documentary filmmaker, wants to anatomize it in his next opus....

Garum was an ancient Greek, Roman, and Byzantine condiment made from fermented fish guts. Sounds gross, but it was the culinary equivalent of turning lead into gold. The depth of flavor it and its modern cousins nam pla or nuoc mam lend to almost everything they touch is something southeast Asian cooks—and increasingly Western ones—understand well. So it’s not such a stretch that Chris Pandel would make his own, experimenting with a variety of fish bones and scraps—variously sardine, smelt, anchovy, and whitebait—and aging them in salt until they weep their magic liquor....

There’s a lot of hate out there for the Ogilvie Transportation Center restrooms. Even folks who love the curvy, blue-glass station’s shopping center and food court ambience despise its main-lobby loos with their distinct scent of eau de urine. The problem is mysterious, since the rest of the station is cleaner than most, but 40,000 coffee-gulping, soda-sipping, beer-swilling, taking-a-leak-in-a-hurry daily commuters have to be a housekeeping nightmare. And it doesn’t help that there’s often a line at the women’s room long enough to make you wish you were carrying a gas mask....

For a guy who’s made a name for himself with live performances just shy of riot inducing, Fucked Up front man Damian “Pink Eyes” Abraham is a remarkably level-headed thinker. His response to the announcement by Canadian indie-pop group Stars that they’d be boycotting Arizona while on tour because of its heinous immigration law was a reasoned and efficient takedown of that kind of empty, knee-jerk grandstanding. (Though I’m sure My Morning Jacket’s newly announced Arizona boycott has state legislators falling all over themselves in a rush to repeal....

On August 8 Judge Laura Sullivan took her place on the bench in Cook County’s central bond court, where the process of deciding who would sit in jail and who would walk free began just after noon. Most days, it ends less than two hours later, after whichever judge is on the bench that day spends an average of a minute apiece determining the price of liberty for more than 100 recently arrested men and women....

Luca Cimarusti, Reader music listings coordinator Ryley Walker, fingerstyle guitar prodigy Itasca, Unmoored by the Wind When people call a record “fall music” it usually makes my blood boil, but I gotta give it up for Kayla Cohen, aka Itasca. Unmoored by the Wind, which came out in October, is really brilliant music for this time of year. Cohen’s heady lyrics and incredible guitar playing make my morning hangover a little brighter....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It doesn’t happen a lot, thankfully (though it did happen recently), but getting leveled by spoiled restaurant food is an occupational hazard, that has lasting effects beyond the obvious physical ones, kind of like culinary post-traumatic stress. I’d give just about anything to dodge that living hell again. Today in its report on the national meeting of the American Chemical Society held here last week, the Trib says University of South Carolina chemist John Lavigne has developed a “dipstick” that changes color when it comes in contact with “non-volatile biogenic amines”–which occur when bacteria break down proteins during the decay process....

Philip Montoro, Reader music editor, is obsessed with … Abou El Leef, Super Leefa Egyptian singer Abou El Leef, born in 1968, released his first album in 2010 and Super Leefa last year. His music partakes of the populism of shaabi but not the aggressively cheap futuristic production of youthful subgenres such as mahragan. The playfully postmodern arrangements on Super Leefa collide decades of Arabic and Western pop: Auto-Tuned vocals overlap with raggedly soulful traditional singing, nasal folkloric reeds give way to sassy muted trumpet, and the rhythm tracks hop from jaunty hand drums to decadent dance beats to funky 80s synth bass....

Men who dance are in short supply. So to scare up five male choreographers for a single performance is a feat. Nomi Dance Company’s “A Few Great Men” does just that—and never mind the fact that only two performers in Laura Kariotis’s company of nine are male. Noting that men “approach passion and aggression differently,” Kariotis is reviving two works by men and sought out male dance makers to choreograph three new pieces....

When the severely beaten body of 14-year-old Emmett Till was pulled from Mississippi’s Tallahatchie River in 1955, word didn’t have to travel far in order to reach John Lewis. The now Georgia congressman and longtime civil rights activist was a year older than Till when news of his murder made its way to nearby Troy, Alabama, where Lewis was born and raised. “I was fifteen, black, at the edge of my own manhood, just like him,” Lewis wrote about Till in his 1998 memoir Walking With the Wind....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I first heard a couple of songs by Chicago’s Kaspar Hauser a few years ago, though I don’t remember exactly because they failed to make any impression on me. I’m pretty sure their dramatic improvment is part of the reason I’m mildly taken with their new album, Quixotic/Taxidermy (Backward Masking), though it’s good enough that I’d pay attention even if I’d never heard the band before....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As Reader movie critic J.R. Jones noted in his review, the original version of Margaret was much longer than the one that reached theaters. Writer/director Kenneth Lonergan was forced to cut the running time down to 149 minutes in order to get it released, and it’s interesting to speculate on what exactly is missing from the tale of Lisa Cohen, a privileged Manhattan teen who goes a little mad after inadvertently causing a bus accident that kills a woman....

Bacchanalia For me, it was love at first bite of lobster ravioli: hand-rolled by a local gentleman, enfolding creamy crustacean, and transcending the cliche vodka sauce to achieve a fine balance of richness and acidity. “Seafood and Pasta” is a delicious dish of noodles, calamari, lobster, and shrimp with an encircling crown of mussels, in a light but intensely flavorful tomato broth. The veal saltimbocca pleased with thin slices, particularly hammy prosciutto, popping-fresh rosemary, and just a touch of cheese....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Neither McVay nor Zacek has said an untoward public word about these events; in a Reader story by Deanna Isaacs, Zacek even wished “the best” to his successor as artistic director, Chay Yew. But there are other ways to make a protest. If I had Zacek’s particular talents, I might, for instance, decide to direct a play about a rich, philistine corporate raider who makes a move on a venerable old firm, figuring that he and his handpicked board can pump up profits by wrecking its traditions, closing down its core business, and throwing its longtime staff out of their jobs....