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Anthony Roberts transforms actual breakup letters (most delivered via e-mail) into monologues, songs, and sketches in this tart, funny revue by GroundUp Theatre. Addressing our inadequate modes of communication as much as fizzling relationships, the piece–performed by three women and three men, including Roberts–deftly exploits the comic contrast between the letter writers’ raw emotion and the written word’s cool formality. One woman outlines her dissatisfaction using Roman numerals and bullet points, and another frames her desperate pleas with the most conventional of salutations and closings....

Karen Abbott Little is known of the Everleighs’ background. They claimed descent from Kentucky aristocracy but are believed to have come from a Virginia family hit hard by the Civil War. Simms was their real name; Everleigh–a pun–was assumed, as were, the women insisted, their southern accents. “Just piecing together their whole background,” says Abbot, “they were ingenious in how they learned to present themselves.” After running a brothel in Omaha, the women moved to Chicago in late 1899 to establish a high-class bordello....

In the media tent at Lollapalooza and the stories and blog posts that came out of it, the focus tends to fall on the festival’s obvious hooks: the canonical band with a reputation to uphold (Depeche Mode’s Friday-night headlining set spanned their career), the high-profile schedule change (the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, who replaced the Beastie Boys after Adam Yauch announced his cancer diagnosis, played a bit of “So What’cha Want” in tribute), the potentially derailing injury (No Age guitarist Randy Randall took the stage with his arm in a sling after dislocating his shoulder in a dance contest), the band-on-band drama (when Animal Collective cut into Tool’s set time, Tool started playing along to Animal Collective’s set)....

It’s rare to see any dancer perform beyond the age of 50, but the remarkable duet on this program—Place, created for Ana Laguna, 54, and superstar Baryshnikov, 61, by Laguna’s husband, Swedish choreographer Mats Ek—not only acknowledges but celebrates the dancers’ maturity. Lifts and carries are slow and low; instead of dazzling technique, we see effort, emotion, and vulnerability. Not that Place is necessarily sad: the music, by Flaskkvartetten (“Flesh Quartet”), shifts feeling moment by moment as the dancers slip almost imperceptibly from challenging each other to reconciliation, from playing together to rejection, from frustration to comic boredom....

I’m a Buddhist. I chant. What sets it apart from other faiths is that your prayers are definitely answered. You chant about what you desire or what you want to change in your life and you start to see things move. Vern Hester, 53, is a writer and photographer. His music column in Windy City Times is called Bent Nights. —Leor Galil Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But there were a lot of other things....

Three days before Thanksgiving, I received a press release from Northwestern University proclaiming a great day in the school’s history: “Mayor Rahm Emanuel to speak on campus.” That’s a very impressive-sounding claim until you realize that there’s no substantive link between anything the mayor does and these jobs, other than his habit of taking credit for them. Mayor Emanuel might as well send out a press release saying that the sun has risen in the east every day since he took office—an equally accurate though irrelevant correlation....

Ted Cox On every corner, a mole Putting a quasi-upscale Mexican restaurant half a block from Ravenswood’s Mixteco Grill seems a bit like setting up your gourmet burger joint across the street from Kuma’s Corner. But that’s what relative newcomer El Maya has done. And if you think about it, there isn’t a whole lot of uncolonized territory when it comes to midscale Mexican places on the north side. Just a bit northeast of Mixteco and El Maya, there’s Cosina Grill....

Animal City’s See You in the Funny Pages I got hooked on local rock foursome Animal City when I heard the first track from the band’s forthcoming See You in the Funny Pages (not to be confused with Paper Mice’s The Funny Papers). That opening tune, “Worst Kinda Crush,” has a charming lo-fi organ melody that wormed its way into my head and had me playing it over and over again....

When drummer-vocalist Dean Spunt and guitarist Randy Randall, aka LA duo No Age, walked into the AV-aerie last Tuesday and started taping their T-shirts to the wall over the merch table, you could tell they were exhausted. They burn a phenomenal amount of energy onstage, and they’d already played once that night, at a free show to help promote a new indie-leaning MP3-and-merch site called Shockhound. Now they were about to play again, as the not-so-secret headliner on a bill with Soft Circle, Lichens, and Love of Everything....

Tunesmith Cy Coleman (Sweet Charity, City of Angels) wrote some of his best songs for this 1997 musical–his last Broadway show–about Times Square prostitutes and pimps. And the Bohemian Theatre Ensemble’s knockout non-Equity cast delivers the jazz-funk-gospel score with volcanic power and dramatic nuance. But the script, by Coleman, David Newman, and lyricist Ira Gasman, is erratic. Clumsily melding raucous comedy and violent melodrama, it glamorizes the characters’ sleazy lifestyle, then heavy-handedly underscores its danger and ugliness....

Drafthouse Films “F Is for Fart” This weekend the Logan presents late shows of The ABCs of Death, a bulging horror/fantasy anthology film (130 minutes with the end credits) to which an international assortment of filmmakers have contributed episodes of three or four minutes, each taking death as its theme and a letter of the alphabet as its inspiration. An opening title warns that no one under 18 will be admitted, and in point of fact the movie is pretty extreme, trading heavily in sadism (in Simon Rumley’s “P Is for Pressure” a poor mother is driven to make an animal “crush film”); misogyny (in Jorge Michel Grau’s “I Is for Ingrown,” a woman chained in a bathtub is injected by her captor and dies horribly); scatology (in Noboru Iguchi’s “F Is for Fart,” a schoolgirl in love with her teacher bathes in the yellow gas from the woman’s backside); and self-mutilation (in Xavier Gens’s “X Is for XXL,” a fat woman taunted for her looks decides to carve off her own flesh)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Compounding the problem was a nosedive in demand from China brought on by the end of the summer Olympics. For months Chinese manufacturers had ramped up production and gobbled up recycled commodities because they knew they’d have to scale back operations during the games, when the government ordered cuts in air pollution. By fall many of them had excess inventory and weren’t buying anything else....

Shawn Childress, who releases funky hip-hop tracks under the name Awdazcate, has a thing for waffles. It’s in the name of his loose collective (Waffle Gang), his online radio show (Waffle Season), and his annual festival, aka Waffle Fest, which celebrates this city’s underground hip-hop scene. Since its debut in 2011 the bash has showcased a multigenerational array of local acts, and Waffle Fest Four is no different: the bill includes Molemen rapper Astonish, long-grinding rapper Longshot, and Wogz, a youngster who raps, sings, and plays violin....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Whether religion is a good place to look for faith and values seems to vary over time. For example, in the 1960s, ministers were among the most valuable voices of change because they found the best parts of the Bible and acted on it. Now, even in the milder sects, clergy is so busy keeping their budget up and vestry happy that you hardly see a white collar at a demonstration any more....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Peculiar art-pop trio Pit er Pat were one of my favorite Chicago bands of the aughts, mostly for the way they always kept me guessing. All three members eventually moved to Los Angeles, where they disbanded a couple of years ago, but drummer Butchy Fuego has been busy in a wide variety of projects, working with everyone from Boredoms to M....

Scrap-metal bird courtesy Dr. Evermor of the Forevertron In February the celebrated Allagash Brewing Company of Portland, Maine, released FV 13, their first beer aged and soured in a huge oak vessel called a foudre. “FV 13” stands for fermentation vessel 13, the name the brewery gave to the foudre involved—they’d superstitiously skipped 13 when numbering their stainless steel fermenters, then doubled back to it for this wooden one, which formerly belonged to a winemaker....

As much as there is to like about technologies like smartphones and cheap prosumer digital cameras, they’ve attracted some criticism for enabling the swarms of concert documentarians who distract or disturb the people who are just there to enjoy the music. But it’s impossible to hate John Yingling, who for the past five years has been at seemingly every vaguely artsy-weird rock show in the city shooting video for his blog, Gonzo Chicago....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A tie: Chicago stand-up has always favored the off-kilter, and this year two comics found their eccentric voices at the same time. In a kind of warm deadpan, Beth Stelling—who hosts the Entertaining Julia showcase (open run: Sundays, 8:30 PM, Town Hall Pub, 3340 N. Halsted, 773-525-1668, free)—twists stories about her childhood until their oddest, most embarrassing features are on full display....

Warning: this review is lousy with spoilers. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Taken as a whole, the movies offer a damning critique of global capitalism as it works its way down to the street and poisons the most intimate human encounters. But there’s also a powerful countertheme at work, because all five movies deal with parenthood in one way or another. Of course, giving life to another person is a kind of transaction too, but as many parents will tell you, it can profoundly alter the way you see the world, skewing your personal calculus in favor of someone else in a way even love and marriage might not....

This 1985 debut feature by Ivory Coast director Desiré Ecaré gathered some attention for its steamy sexuality (the film was banned in its native country), though Ecaré ultimately seems more concerned with establishing connections between economics and emerging African feminism than in providing erotic kicks (not surprisingly, the feminism that emerges owes more to tribal traditions of gender solidarity and rivalry than to modern ideological consciousness). The film divides into rural and urban halves (shot ten years apart), which Ecaré ties together with scenes of ritual music and dancing (less “authentic” than the folk sequences in Ababacar Samb’s Jom, to which they’ve been compared: Ecaré’s Africa is nothing if not a sociocultural hybrid)....