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“Hospitals” Tonight, Cobra Lounge welcomes Acid Baby Jesus from Athens, Greece. “Psychedelic punk rock” isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when I think of Athens, so I was surprised—and delighted—to discover that Acid Baby Jesus’s new single on Slovenly hits super hard. Today’s 12 O’Clock Track is the first song from the seven-inch “Hospitals.” It’s tough and repetitive, weird and noisy. I love the layers of fuzzy, echoey guitar tones that fall in and out over the course of the song, but my favorite part is the vocals: they sound bored, detached, and unstable, ready to snap at any second—but they still manage to carry an addictive melody....

Recently I decided to make a DJ mix, and with so much psychedelically atmospheric rap and R&B and dance music that’s come out recently, I decided to go with a chill-out theme. At one point during the several days I spent tweaking the track listing and order before actually mixing it, my friend passed along Cyril Hahn’s remix of the Destiny’s Child classic “Say My Name,” which turned out to fit perfectly....

The world has changed since 2000, the year this hilarious physical-theater take on Shakespeare’s Macbeth debuted. Today the Bush administration’s disastrous decision to invade Iraq seems more disastrous than ever–and that bloody context gives 500 Clown’s revival, now at Steppenwolf as part of its Visiting Company Initiative, a dark, bitter edge. At the same time, heightened awareness of the danger of combining ambition and ineptitude only underlines the comedy as three clowns compete to play Macbeth, clambering and falling over an 11-foot scaffold in their efforts to snatch a crown dangling from the flies like a cheesy disco ball....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » My story last week about the Plant, Chicago’s nascent vertical farm growing in a decommissioned Back of the Yards meat-processing factory, makes note that if all goes according to plan, the auxiliary food businesses developer John Edel hopes to attract to augment its farm operations will collectively operate as sort of a giant shared kitchen. Businesses can rent plots in the rooftop greenhouses and grow their own produce, the mushroom farm can use the brewery’s spent grains to grow fungi, and tenants will have plenty of communal areas in which to eat, cook, hang out, and share ideas and resources....

Within a year of those first rehearsals they’d found a foothold in the Chicago rock-club scene. “Our senior year of high school,” says Omori, “we played all of those venues, the Bottle and Schubas and all of those places.” But the band quickly learned that this was cutting them off from potential fans even as it exposed them to new people. “We were under the impression that if we were offered shows at these venues and we played all the time, we would get a following,” Omori says....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “We have pretty well won the battle against the non-compete payments and a decent interval has passed,” Black wrote. “A conciliatory gesture should be made now that could not be construed as a sign of weakness or a confession of excess.” Excess is in the eye of the beholder, and nothing Black beheld troubled him. “These companies [Hollinger International, the holding company Hollinger Inc....

On August 28, 1963, Chicago teacher and activist Timuel Black stood in the mall in Washington with 250,000 others and absorbed Martin Luther King Jr.’s soaring vision of a new kind of nation. The 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington A dream unrealized for African-Americans in Chicago A new generation of activists fights injustice, from school cuts to Trayvon Martin “My feelings were, ‘There’s going to be a new world,’” Black says, “because he said, ‘I have a dream....

330 S. Dearborn Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When I walked into this new South Loop boutique and saw the displays of soap, candy, and wrapping paper, I figured it was going to be one of those places that can’t decide if it’s a clothing store or a gift shop. But a spin around the floor quickly put the question to rest. Florodora is definitely majoring in things you can wear, with a minor in home accents....

A PROGRAMMING NOTE: I hosted a live taping of the Savage Lovecast in Seattle on Valentine’s Day, and it went great—thanks to all who came (especially to the five boys who left with butt plugs in their butts)—but I made the mistake of having a drink or five afterward, and I’m so fucking hungover right now that I shouldn’t be sitting upright, much less giving advice. But deadlines are deadlines. So here we go ....

Flame-haired siblings Alex and Francis White of busy Chicago garage-rock duo White Mystery tell Gossip Wolf they’ve just wrapped up a European tour and will self-release a smokin’ new album, Telepathic, on Sat 4/20. More immediately, on Valentine’s Day at Schubas they headline a benefit for the Christopher Saathoff Foundation with Absolutely Not, Twin Peaks (see Soundboard), and Post Honeymoon. Saathoff played in Chin Up Chin Up and in a duo with Alex White (as Chris Playboy); he was killed by a hit-and-run driver while walking home from the Empty Bottle in 2004, and the foundation his family established in his name supports youth arts programs and other children’s charities....

The occasional world war, economic meltdown, or ecological collapse notwithstanding, bourgeois society is a fabulous thing. It’s given millions upon millions of average people luxuries they couldn’t have contemplated under more primitive arrangements, including clean water, plentiful food, warm shelters, store-bought clothes, imported rugs, and a reasonable expectation that they won’t get stoned to death by a mob. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A nominee for the 2010 best-play Tony Award—and, in my opinion, Ruhl’s strongest work so far—In the Next Room is set in the 1880s, sometime soon after Joseph Mortimer Granville invented the electric vibrator....

Practices like data mining and data scraping are uncovering more of the world’s raw information than ever before: seriously big data. Are we going to do something constructive with it, or just drown? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “It’s imperative that we create more useful and compelling ways of communicating the data,” says Michael Golec, an SAIC professor who worked with the students. “Most forms of data representation date from the late 19th or early 20th century....

Brain Idea’s final LP, Cosmos Factory Brain Idea, which unfortunately called it quits last fall, have always been one of my favorite local acts. They started back in 2009, playing a heady style of kiwi-influenced pop music, and released records for both Mexican Summer and local label and shop Permanent Records. Since the band dissolved, bassist/vocalist Ben Scott has been keeping busy with Outside World, another excellent local indie-pop act....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » MOPDTK is led by bassist Moppa Elliott and plays its original songs–which are explicitly modeled after classic tunes, forms, and trends of modern jazz, mainly from the 50s and 60s–with a great deal of irreverence and tongue-in-cheek humor. Performances veer off in all kinds of directions, either breaking down into pure chaos or shifting into schlock like prefab disco, and then snap back into form....

Halfway through the school year my family moved to Saint Louis. Alex and I exchanged a few letters but then lost touch. But years later, as a young man visiting Toronto with my girlfriend, I surmised that Alex was no more likely to have stayed in Sudbury than I was, and where would he go but to Toronto? So I looked for him in the phone book, and sure enough, he was now Alexander Leve, attorney....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ryley Walker’s musical journey has been an interesting one. I first saw him play three or four years ago at now defunct warehouse space the Mopery, where he was shredding outrageous, free-jazz noise guitar. As time went on, his solo compositions started getting dreamier, adding more melody and space to his virtuoso-level playing. Somewhere along the line, Walker switched over completely to acoustic guitars, favoring John Fahey-influenced fingerpicking, and left avant-garde noise rock behind....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Michael Gebert Next’s version of Paul Bocuse’s “V.G.E.” (named for 1970s French president Valery Giscard D’Estaing), a soup course on stacked plates But even the French don’t serve those kinds of whole fish covered with aspic and garnished with lemons cut into roses anymore, so now in the competition the fish course is plated for each judge individually. Recognizing the artifice and anachronism of the presentation platter, Next’s platters are full-on, impractical whimsy—one, which pays tribute to Chicago’s Printer’s Row, spells out “Bocuse d’Or” in metal type and includes a beef roulade plated on a vintage paper cutter....

One of the odd things about Bill James’s “Manager in a Box” format I used to compare the Cubs’ Lou Piniella and the White Sox’ Ozzie Guillen last week is the question, “Is he more of an optimist or more of a problem solver?” It should be optimist or pessimist, right? Yet the question as James originally framed it casts Guillen, in particular, in relief. Guillen has been an optimist this season, in that he has expected his players to perform up to their past history....

For certain kinds of people, achieving the American dream has always been a stealth operation. Coming up during the Depression, for instance, my dad obscured his Ashkenazic roots by Latinizing his first name (Maurice, from Moishe), classicizing his middle name (Alexander, after Alexander the Great) and Teutonizing his surname (Adler, from, well, something that wasn’t Adler). The first act is a tour de force in this Goodman Theatre production directed by Chuck Smith, taking the traditional comedy of mistaken identity to odd and amusing new places....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Maclean’s, Canada’s national newsweekly, has just published a special edition on the trial, which it modestly calls the “white-collar trial of the century.” As it explains, “What might have once blown over as an internal debate at Hollinger International about compensation and bonus payments, has instead blown up into one of the most captivating corporate scandals in decades. Conrad Black faces 14 charges–including mail and wire fraud, racketeering, money laundering and obstruction of justice–in a trial set to play out in a Chicago courtroom over the next few months....