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For a third consecutive Labor Day weekend, the North Coast Music Festival takes over Union Park with a packed bill that draws from the seemingly disparate but surprisingly synergistic worlds of electronic dance music, jam bands, hip-hop, and indie rock. Sixty-nine acts will take to the festival’s four stages over the weekend, and another 50 will spin for dancers wearing headphones at the Groupon Noise Refuge Personal Space Silent Disco—the DJs will perform two at a time on separate channels, and the headphones can be switched from one to the other....

Naomi Wallace’s class- and history-conscious plays (One Flea Spare) have been widely acclaimed; she even got a MacArthur genius grant. This 1999 piece, set in Depression-era Appalachia, had me wondering why. Maybe it’s the mystery plot, unpredictable only in its particulars. Maybe it’s the inescapable echoes of the 1986 film Stand by Me, with its pop-cult lock on trestle-related drama, or the cartoonish Odets-esque concern for the “common man.” Or maybe it’s the clumsy expressionist moments when characters figuratively and literally touch....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But the Schwim Schwam Burger? That was more of a mystery. Besides Central Kitchen’s menu, the only result for “Schwim Schwam” appeared to be a Web comedy show, which proved to be surprisingly resistant to the efforts of anyone interested in viewing it. Only its opening credits could be found on YouTube, and its Twitter account explicitly said not to follow it....

Violinist, vocalist, and composer Carla Kihlstedt has traversed styles and defied hierarchies for her entire career. She came into her own in the Bay Area in the mid-90s and now lives near Boston, teaching improvisation at the New England Conservatory of Music. You may know Kihlstedt as a member of wild San Francisco art-rock band Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, or as a trusted collaborator of veteran experimental guitarist Fred Frith. She maintains the improvising project Minamo with Japanese free-jazz pianist Satoko Fujii, and in the projects that she masterminds she often draws from literature—in 2008 she presented Necessary Monsters, inspired by the work of Jorge Luis Borges, at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art....

Tucked into what used to be an antique store just off Armitage in Bucktown, the aptly named Antico is by all appearances a typical neighborhood restaurant. Yet the unassuming facade, echoed inside by exposed-brick walls unadorned by a single framed print or painting, masks a crack staff and a kitchen that understands when to push a dish forward and when to hang back and let the food present itself—all under the direction of Trinna Schramm, a former expediter at Alinea, and chef-owner Brad Schlieder, a veteran of A Tavola....

Since its, uh, debut MP3 made the rounds this winter, Yeasayer has bewitched me with its full-tilt weirdness. Clearly the product of a post-TV on the Radio world, the quartet keeps shifting its sound around in what-the-fuck ways. One minute the whole mix is warped by walls of vaguely fonky deep-space reverb; the next, a fretless bass has somehow gotten involved. The band’s first proper release, -“Sunrise” (a 12-inch single on Monitor), sounds like a best-of-Brooklyn amalgam–TVOTR, Animal Collective, the Rapture’s housey builds—on paper, admittedly a revolting prospect....

A hand, reaching out like an antenna, touches my hair—then pulls away sharply. It returns, curious, to pat its way around my skull. And comes back again, affectionately, to tousle my hair like a puppy’s ears. During the workshop, Andrew Schoen, who plays the Son, wasn’t the only actor to run into me. As I observed the action, seated on a platform about a foot off the ground, another felt my notebook, then moved away....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » PAT GRAHAM Best Picture: There Will Be Blood. Best Director: Paul Thomas Anderson, There Will Be Blood. Best Original Screenplay: Tamara Jenkins, The Savages. Best Adapted Screenplay: Paul Thomas Anderson, There Will Be Blood. Best Actress: Laura Linney, The Savages (“choice with a figurative gun to my head, though Nicole Kidman in Margot at the Wedding‘s more to my liking”)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I still recall my skepticism when the Berlin-based composer Arnold Dreyblatt, a disciple of just-intonation guru La Monte Young, took the stage at the Empty Bottle with the three hirsute gents of North Carolina’s Megafaun in September of 2008. At the time I knew nothing of the band, and their bluegrass instruments seemed incompatible with Dreyblatt’s music—a full-bore assault on the senses using resonating, vibrating strings....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s been four years since the duo of Elisa Ambrogio and Pete Nolan (aka Magik Markers) released Balf Quarry, a sometimes punk and abrasive, sometimes haunting and pristine album that proved a departure from their noisier and less song-structured debut full-length, Boss. Finally (finally) the longtime musical partners are beginning to tease a new album (add in new bass player John Shaw, too)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A favorite moment from this weekend’s Riot Fest occurred when Luca Cimarusti and I were rehashing the Screeching Weasel set we had just witnessed—it’s just Ben Weasel and a bunch of dudes, but the hits were still the hits—and started to hear Bad Religion songs from the Roots Stage, well over a hundred yards away. It’s all pretty simple: tight and crisp punk rock from tour dogs, like Brian Baker and Greg Hetson, who have never stopped playing a brand of Riot Fest-appropriate anthems and haven’t stopped churning out albums since the early 80s....

I don’t know that print is dying, but if it is I want it properly mourned. So I’m partial to the sentiments of Dan Sinker, a print person moving on but paying his respects to the medium he leaves behind. Sinker goes so far as to concede print virtues he hopes his new paperless publishing experiment will replicate. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Submissions can be sent to stories@cellstories....

[Editor’s note: Acre received a revamp shortly after this review; Bar Ombra now occupies the northern half of the space.] Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A respectable selection of craft beers and wines are pushed behind the original curvilinear wooden bar on the dim, gloomy tavern side, while the dining room has been done up in sunset-toned American Gothic, its walls appointed with obsolete farm implements, one of which, I was entertained to hear, is called a “diggler....

Lady Gaga wearing her “disco ball” bra. It’s the same handmade costume piece she wore during her sparsely attended side-stage appearance at the festival in 2007. Her performance had a strong motivational-speaker theme that hit its most personal note when she told her teeming fans about making the bra by hand and using it at her first Lollapalooza set, framing the story as a portrait in perseverance. (She definitely doesn’t lack an ego....

Since graduating in 2003 from Boston University, where he studied acting, Las Vegas native Baron Vaughn has appeared on Broadway (Drowning Crow) and VH1 (Awesomely Oversexed) and made the rounds of the New York stand-up scene. With a rabid theatricality a la Chris Tucker, Vaughn sings, creates sound effects, and jumps in and out of characters in unpredictable bits–about Billy Ocean, landlocked countries, the “ethnic needs” aisle at Rite Aid. He can be straightforward too: after asking who in an audience owned an iPod, he noted the volume of applause and replied, “Very nice to hear....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Kentucky mandolinist Don Rigsby fills the lengthy liner notes for his latest album, Doctor’s Orders: A Tribute to Ralph Stanley (Rebel), with a detailed account of his first encounter with the bluegrass legend the album salutes. He saw Stanley perform live for the first time in 1974, which happened to be his sixth birthday, and if his memories are to be trusted, he was pretty ecstatic in anticipation of the concert....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I saw the best punk show of the year tonight, c/o No Age, in Camden, where they rocked the 1200 people at the legit venue, walked across the street and played punk covers to 100. I watched them learn “Where Eagles Dare” in the back hallway–someone dialed up the tab on their iphone and they found someone with it on their iPod, and 5 minutes later they were playing it to seething swarming ebullient punx....

Dear Mr. Raymer, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For those of us firmly entrenched in Camp Friction, the news is this: the Fictions are growing some balls. Though you wouldn’t be able to tell from the fruity Nordic sweater Ammerman allowed himself to be photographed in for your publication, the Fictions are now so far past this “twee” thing it’s a joke. The change I’ve noticed, by attending a series of shows over the past few months, is a heartfelt thrust in the direction of wanton self-confidence and dorkdom....

Few members of the City Council are more devoted to transparency and inclusive democracy than Alderman Joe Moore. Want proof? He’s put his gritty, diverse 49th Ward on the map as the first—and, so far, only—community in the U.S. to practice participatory budgeting. In spring 2009, on the advice of the Brown University-based nonprofit Participatory Budgeting Project, Moore had invited Rogers Park leaders to join a steering committee. “Block clubs, churches, schools, mosques, you name it” were included, he says....

Plenty of independent labels are offering special Thanksgiving weekend deals for folks looking to pick up records for the holidays, and Ice Age Records founder Kris Di Benedetto is doing a little something extra: he’s donating all the money that comes in to Ice Age’s web store through the weekend to the Urban League of Metropolitan Saint Louis, in response to the Saint Louis County grand jury’s decision not to indict Officer Darren Wilson for the fatal shooting of Michael Brown (Di Benedetto was inspired by Philadelphia label Square of Opposition, which will be doing the same thing on Friday)....