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Last week Empty Bottle owner Bruce Finkelman closed a deal to buy Thalia Hall, a four-story landmark building near the 18th Street Pink Line stop in Pilsen. Finkelman says all six of Thalia Hall’s storefronts will be commercial spaces, and the corner storefront will become a tavern called Dusek’s (named after John Dusek, who founded Thalia Hall in 1892); its basement will be a separate bar, the Punch House, specializing in punch cocktails....

The much-touted first Chicago Gourmet kicks off tonight with a gala reception from 6:30 to 10 PM on the Harris Theater rooftop. The “Grand Tastings” main event at Pritzker Pavilion takes place from 11 AM to 6 PM Saturday and 11:15 AM to 5 PM Sunday, offering food and wine tastings as well as cooking demos by chefs including Carrie Nahabedian, Mindy Segal, Kendal Duque, and Gale Gand. There are also food and wine seminars and “Grand Cru” wine tastings both days, plus the Whole Foods Village for families (tickets are sold separately for all these events)....

Bratty Pack? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the years I’ve been reading the Reader, I’ve never been so outraged by an article. I am not at all criticizing Jessica Hopper’s part, she did her job as a reporter/journalist and I respect that. Bands who have been playing their music years before these kids were born are still “paying their dues,” and it’s insulting that they think they’re owed something for the handful of years they’ve been playing....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For me the one name always criminally absent from the list is Michael Orlove of the Department of Cultural Affairs, an approachable guy without a lick of music-biz cynicism or attitude. Not only does he maintain the World Music Festival, the ever-popular SummerDance program, and book the year-long array of cutting edge local, national, and international acts that perform at the Cultural Center, but he routinely facilitates all sorts of public and private music events that happen each year....

Sisters of Gion In the Film section of this week’s Reader, we spotlight the 19th annual Black Harvest Film Festival and Bruno Dumont’s Outside Satan, both of which screen at the Gene Siskel Film Center; we also have a medium-length review of Woody Allen’s latest, Blue Jasmine, which opens today at River East 21 and the Landmark Century. All three are worth checking out, but if you have time for only one screening this week, make it Sisters of Gion (1936), which screens at Doc Films tomorrow at 7 and 9 PM....

Six years ago Brian Babylon was making a nice living as media director for an instructional video company—they once taught lawyers for tobacco giant Philip Morris how to select jurors in cancer cases. But then he found out he wasn’t a bad comic, having held his own at Jokes and Notes, the formidable new comedy club down the street from his apartment in Bronzeville. He applied for a host position with Vocalo (WBEZ’s experiment in hyperlocal public radio), got it, and decided a funny life would be worth the pay cut....

I spoke at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon, last Thursday night. PU students submitted a lot more questions—anonymous, on three-by-five-inch cards—than I could possibly answer in the 90 minutes we had together. So I’m going to use this week’s column to answer some of the ones I didn’t get to. Here we go: Second: all those quiet, timid, and cowardly NALT Christians out there who support marriage equality but have allowed their conservative coreligionists to hijack Christianity....

There isn’t much on a typical Black Lips record I couldn’t play for my parents—the band’s brand of garage rock follows a blueprint that’d be perfectly familiar to Dick Biondi. But onstage they’re another story: the Lips are raunchy at their mildest, often descending to the kind of public excretory displays that made GG Allin such a hit at parties. The audiences at their shows are thus tilted somewhat toward people who think shit like that is funny, or who don’t mind staying well clear of the stage....

There’s a book to be written whose message would be simply, “Don’t ever write a book.” It would tell the tale of many an author who devoted years to the writing, squandered more years seeking a publisher, and if and when the book was finally printed watched the nation ignore it. No doubt the book I describe would serve as its own excellent example. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Playwright Rajiv Joseph is best known for Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, which was introduced to Chicago last winter by the Lookingglass Theatre Company. A Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2010, the play offers a dreamlike, absurd, yet morally and politically serious evocation of Dubya’s Iraq war—narrated by the title cat, who’s killed for biting off an American soldier’s hand only to find himself walking the ruined streets of Baghdad as a ghost....

thursday24 Thursday24 Chants Robert Glasper Trio Xray Eyeballs Friday25 Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr. Robert Glasper Trio Greenhornes Nicolas Jaar Thollem McDonas Saturday26 Dawnbringer Godspeed You! Black Emperor Francois K Sunday27 Agalloch Monday28 Steve Coleman & Five Elements Wednesday30 Danielson XRAY EYEBALLS The world needs more bands willing to write a “crystal meth breakup song,” and Brooklyn’s Xray Eyeballs are here to help. A five-piece featuring three members of Golden Triangle (whose Double Jointer LP was one of my favorites of 2010), Xray Eyeballs released their debut seven-inch on HoZac this month, and it’d make a fine soundtrack to late-night leering and frothing in the downtown-at-dawn dropout discos Richard Hell once sang about....

thursday27 Thursday27 Bird TalkThee Silver Mt. Zion Orchestra Friday28 Shondes Saturday29 Gilles Aubry, Antoine Chessex, and Valerio TricoliBlowoffAndre Williams, Dirty Diamonds Sunday30 Brian Jonestown MassacreEleventh Dream DayPharez Whitted Sextet Monday31 Broken Bells, Morning Benders Wednesday2 Erykah Badu THEE SILVER MT. ZION MEMORIAL ORCHESTRA On six albums across the past decade, this Montreal-based collective—formerly known as A Silver Mt. Zion, Thee Silver Mountain Reveries, and Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tra-la-la Band With Choir, among other permutations—has developed a sprawling, detailed sound by fusing ragged, passionate folk to widescreen post-rock....

thursday9 Thursday9 Marina & the DiamondsSleep Friday10 Sam AmidonLesley FlaniganOvalRangda, Buke & GassRatatat Saturday11 Ben FrostHigh Places Monday13 No Age Tuesday14 Corridors Wednesday15 Joshua AbramsThee Oh Sees SLEEP There are probably a few second-string doom-metal and stoner-metal bands who know in their heart of hearts that there’s simply no way they’ll ever be anywhere near as heavy and trippy and revelatory as Sleep or make a record as seminal as 1992’s Holy Mountain....

Given Chicago’s troubles and the need for a fresh approach, the residency requirement for candidates seems backwards: candidates shouldn’t have to prove that they’ve lived here for the last year, but that they haven’t set foot in the city during that time. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Monday could have been viewed as a bright day for American democracy. Cynics are forever pointing to the shortcomings of our government—and especially to how the rich and powerful are above the rules....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “[Paris] Hilton’s response is now the top story on Google News, and apparently the McCain campaign is receiving so many media requests about it, that they had to post a response on their website. They have gotten into a spat with Paris Hilton, which there is basically no way to win. Hilton has nothing to lose, and the back and forth just highlights the frivolic idiocy of McCain’s recent attacks....

A screen shot from the “Cathy Don’t Go” video. If you pay any attention at all to the music press, you’re probably already aware that Christopher Owens—who used to front the band Girls and just released a fascinating debut solo album, Lysandre, that’s festooned with 70s soft-rock signifiers—grew up in a charismatic Christian cult called the Children of God. That fact’s been mentioned in approximately 100 percent of everything written about him, but it’s hard to blame writers for wanting to include such a fascinating piece of information, especially if you know anything about the sect, which was a wing of the hippy Jesus Movement before its founder, David Berg, began preaching on subjects like the sacredness of children’s sexuality....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Columbia College commemorates the Beat generation with a series of exhibitions and programs inspired by Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Their third annual “Talk the Walk” takes visitors on a tour of nine of Columbia’s art galleries. Beatnik fashion, photography, and Kerouac’s original On the Road manuscript scroll will be on display, and rickshaw cabs will chauffeur guests from gallery to gallery....

” . . . life poverty Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Now, the music was certainly beautiful and the singing was accomplished, but those facts in and of themselves don’t account for me weeping into my keyboard. What got me was how the musicians transformed the scene at the mall—or, maybe more accurately, how they brought out what always lay hidden inside it. Singers in street clothes, percussionists pounding tympani on the balcony, shoppers gone silent and attentive as a medieval Latin poem about fate echoed across Bebe and Burberry storefronts—suddenly the plaza was shot through with the knowledge of life and death....

THE VISITOR ssss Written and directed by Thomas McCarthy With Richard Jenkins, Haaz Sleiman, Danai Gurira, and Hiam Abbass Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Perversely, both movies are about men who can’t connect. Fin McBride, the brooding dwarf in The Station Agent, is so fed up with people’s humiliating reactions to him that when he unexpectedly inherits a disused railroad station in rural New Jersey, he retreats into it like a monk....

I was walking along Montrose Avenue this morning when I saw someone wearing a 2016 Olympics T-shirt. It was one of the first times I’d ever seen an ordinary citizen wearing gear promoting Chicago’s bid for the games, so I stopped to ask her why.She said she actually didn’t know much about Mayor Daley’s bid—she hadn’t really been following the issue. She couldn’t even remember how she got the T-shirt.There was a time when Olympic planners predicted that the sale of such merch—”Stir the soul” hats, shirts, and so forth—would help pay for the games....