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The cover of Tiger & Woods’s Through the Green Tiger & Woods are a duo who specialize in extracting snippets from disco and R&B tracks, a few of which they then loop into long, focused, propulsive dance-floor jams. The New York disco revivalists Escort enlisted them to remix their already excellent single “Barbarians,” and rather than lay a loop of their own underneath Escort’s song, Tiger & Woods just take their approach right to the source material....

friday2 cSHORTY’S R & B BLUES BAND West- side promoter Henry L. Survillion (aka Shorty) puts together a rotating crew of accomplished blues, soul, and R & B sidemen for this weekly Friday night gig. Many of them have done road work with well-known names, and among them they’ve got just about every old-school style at their disposal. That’s the idea: for the band to be able to effortlessly back an eclectic parade of vocalists, from veteran crooner Still Bill to feisty soul-blues singers like Lady Kat, Miss Jesi’, and Z....

Scott Miller Music: What Happened? (125 Books) Unlike the blog, which hopped around in time as it unfolded, the book is chronological. This makes it easier to access and more fun to flip through. (Here’s my blurb: “Great for planes.”) That bittiness suits the project—Miller’s writing, as smart as it can be, often feels like an unfiltered and unedited collection of notes. His insights tend to come not in sustained blazes of analysis but in flashes and flickers—in his blurb for the Dismemberment Plan’s “You Are Invited” (1999), for instance, he observes that Pitchfork helped build a bridge from the indie audience to “a world of dance music that a world of musicians don’t get....

The Reader’s Choice: Evanston Public Library’s Big Book Sale Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When it comes down to it, I’ve really got just one reason for claiming the Evanston Public Library’s book sale is best, but it’s a fine one: an edition of Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard,” printed by the Heritage Press of the George Macy Companies and copyrighted 1951....

Chi Cafe Well-designed and bright, with mod orange and lime green accents, Chi Cafe has a spotless glassed-in kitchen and friendly, casually uniformed servers. The food tends toward the veggie-dominated Hong Kong style, with selections like wood ear mushrooms and okra, pea tips with garlic, and our favorite, Chinese chives with special sauce, a delicate stack of greens with jalapeños. The menu packs hundreds of options, including pedestrian faves like General Tso’s and orange chicken, but there’s plenty of edgier fare like pig’s stomach, sizzling intestine, and duck’s tongue with fresh mushrooms....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If you should feel the need to cry over your beer (or vieux carre, as the case may be), you might want to check out the lounge at Graham Elliot Bistro (aka GEB). That’s the domain of Dave Michalowski, the barkeep featured in this week’s Cocktail Challenge, who’s well qualified to lend an ear. As a matter of fact, he’s a licensed clinical professional counselor (LCPC)—just one with a real love of libations....

As I noted in my Critic’s Choice, mysterious rapper Doom has all but admitted to sending imposters wearing his trademark mask to his live gigs to “perform” in his place. He’s never explained himself, but I figure he either thinks it’s some sort of performance art—perhaps in tribute to his clone-building comic-book namesake—or else he’s really as crazy as people say he is. I didn’t think he’d send a fake Doom to his show at the Congress Theater on Saturday for a couple of reasons....

Nightcrawler Robert Elswit has been getting a lot of attention lately for his work on Dan Gilroy’s satirical thriller Nightcrawler and Paul Thomas Anderson’s upcoming Inherent Vice. This attention is deserved, though it hardly represents a breakthrough for the 64-year-old cinematographer, who won an Academy Award in 2008 for Anderson’s There Will Be Blood. (Barring The Master, he’s shot all of Anderson’s movies—the director regularly credits him with determining the films’ style....

As Mayor Rahm Emanuel inches toward announcing which of Chicago’s public schools he wants to close, it’s as good a time as ever to examine the details of his last big education decision. Unfortunately, there’s no way to examine the details of how and why Mayor Emanuel rammed home the longer day because the internal reports, studies, memos, and analyses governing the decision no longer exist. Or maybe they never did....

Grant Pick had been writing for the Reader for about a quarter of a century when, at the age of 57, he died of a heart attack walking home from lunch. That was three years ago last week. In many ways, Grant was the writer who best defined this paper. As he liked telling journalism students who read his pieces and asked where the news pegs were, “There is no news peg....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’m not going to try to guess how much mainstream appeal the people at Roadrunner Records expected an Amanda Palmer solo album to have, but considering that they’d already released a handful of Dresden Dolls records I’m sure they knew that it wasn’t going to be much. But the upside to having Palmer and the Dresden Dolls on your label is that they come with a built-in army of the sort of fanatical devotees who will buy not only the albums but every last single from those albums and who are almost scarily eager to work as an unpaid street team for their beloved artists....

For the last few weeks, Mayor Emanuel has been promising parents and students at schools he’s closing that they’ll have everything from new air conditioners to new computers in the schools he’s sending them to. Just so you know, Lincoln Park is a high-functioning school that’s been one of CPS’s success stories for the last few decades. A few years back their boys’ basketball team—led by Michael “Juice” Thompson, who went on to star at Northwestern—gave powerhouses Simeon and Young a run for their money....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Facets Multimedia’s Lucian Pintilie retrospective, which ended this past Sunday, was a bracing moviegoing experience, if not always an easy one. As I noted in my post leading up to the series, many contemporary Romanian directors cite Pintilie as a key influence: indeed one of the valuable things about this series is that it showed where some of the most vital recent filmmaking takes its cues....

The diction is folktale formal. The characters are named for Yoruba deities. A woman ululates, for chrissake. The opening passages of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s In the Red and Brown Water, and therefore of his “Brother/Sister Plays” trilogy, have such a powerful African flavor about them that—I’m not kidding—I got confused. Was this story really set in Louisiana, as I’d been led to believe? Maybe I’d misunderstood. Maybe this was some Afro-Caribbean island town, or Lagos....

In the June 15 Sun-Times, Maudlyne Ihejirkia tells us the Northwestern campus in Doha, Qatar, just graduated its first class. Some three dozen students received degrees in journalism or communications. Kate Durham, an American who’s managing editor of Egypt Today, says every issue of the monthly English-language magazine (not to mention every page of its impressive website) has to go to the censorship office before it’s published. But the relationship is 33 years old “and we have a very good understanding of what their standards are,” Durham e-mailed me....

Julien Bourgeois My Brightest Diamond’s Shara Worden On the latest album from My Brightest Diamond, This is My Hand (Asthmatic Kitty), the group’s charismatic, mysterious leader Shara Worden injects her brand of art-pop with a serious rhythmic bump, complementing the band’s typically sophisticated arrangements with muscular, hard-hitting grooves. As usual, the core arrangements are built around layers of horns and strings, often delivering pulsing, minimalist patterns derived from contemporary classical music—several members of the new-music group yMusic, who collaborated with Worden on the previous MBD album All Things Will Unwind, reprise their roles here....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » From Germany, Max Zähle’s Raju is a nicely calibrated thriller that takes an unexpected left turn into moral conundrum. A handsome, blond young couple (Julia Richter and Wotan Wilke Möhring, both excellent) arrive in Kolkata, India, to adopt a child; as their cab pulls them into town, long pans from the back window reveal squalid neighborhoods and piles of garbage....

When I was ten years old I was already smoking marijuana and cigarettes. Age 15, I was introduced to syrup, which was codeine, and I was snorting brown dope—we called it Mexican Mud. Then freebasing cocaine. Junior year [at Lindblom Math & Science Academy] I got pregnant. I went to school for one semester my senior year before I dropped out. When I got pregnant, I didn’t use anything. I stopped smoking everything and had my son....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At the end of every year the rhetoricians are heard from, and I was troubled to see it is what it is show up in a couple discussions about phrases it was time to let be. According to an Associated Press report carried in the Tribune, it was just chosen by Lake Superior State University for its annual List of Words Banished from the Queen’s English for Mis-Use, Over-Use and General Uselessness....

Space 900 square feet | Rent $600 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It took Michelle Puetz a month to move into her fourth-floor walk-up in 2002. She was living across the street, with a guy who was by then her ex-boyfriend, and ferried her belongings up the steep, uneven stairs one day at a time. The new apartment was a mess: there’d been one previous tenant, but before that it had been used for storage....