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Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Though Lance Barresi and Liz Tooley jetted for Los Angeles a little over a year ago to open up a second Permanent Records location in Eagle Rock, they’ve nowhere near abandoned the Chicago scene that embraced them back in 2006 when the pair opened up their original brick-and-mortar store at 1914 W. Chicago. I still run into Lance out and about more than I’d expect, seeing that he’s quick to fly in for events like this past March’s Sausage Fest at the Bottle, which Permanent, Captcha, Trouble in Mind, and others help put together as a SXSW sendoff....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This Thursday at 7 PM, University of Chicago Doc Films will screen The General, Buster Keaton’s most famous comedy. In his review for the Reader, Dave Kehr writes, “Buster Keaton may have made more significant films, but The General stands as an almost perfect entertainment.” Films like Sherlock Jr. and The Navigator rank among his best and most important work, but The General isn’t without its share of intrigue....

thursday21 Thursday21 Nile Friday22 Great Society Mind DestroyersHoyle BrothersJoan of Arc Don’t Mind Control Variety ShowFreedy JohnstonTommie Sunshine Saturday23 The AssemblyHoyle BrothersTenement Sunday24 Between the Buried and Me, Devin Townsend ProjectFrode Gjerstad Monday25 Rempis Percussion Quartet Tuesday26 Behemoth Wednesday27 Raise the Red LanternRempis Percussion Quartet Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » HOYLE BROTHERS Though an open-ended weekly gig is good steady work, it makes it easy for audiences to take a band for granted....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Franco cut nearly 2,000 songs, so Braun certainly had his work cut out for him. This thoughtful chronological survey, which runs from 1953 to 1980, traces the maestro’s development and assimilation of new ideas. The 48-page booklet Braun wrote explains the conventions of Congolese music, points out which qualities were derived from Cuban music and which from local ethnic traditions, and provides both sociopolitical and musical contexts....

Better Government Association president Andy Shaw had a piece of hot news for the opening of the BGA’s forum on the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art at the Union League Club last Wednesday. “‘George Lucas is a warm and generous guy,’” Shaw said he was told, “‘but he’s not negotiating sites here. If this site doesn’t fly, the museum will fly to another city.’” FOTP had warned for months that it would do exactly this if there wasn’t a change in the Lucas Museum site, but the announcement had a couple of surprising wrinkles....

New kid in town: Prickly guitar-picker Geoff Farina has moved to the Chi-boogie. According to an anonymous tipster who probably wasn’t Farina, the former Karate front man/Secret Star has followed his lady here while she pursues some higher education, and was recently spotted at the Mako Sica show at the Whistler. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This past weekend Olympia, Washington, lost longtime scene fixture Natalie Cox to hemangiosarcoma, a rare and aggressive form of cancer....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » We also have new reviews of Burlesque, this year’s holiday razzmatazz musical, starring Cher and Christine Aguilera; Doghouse, a UK horror comedy about a handful of guys being stalked by zombie women; Faster, a new action flick starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Billy Bob “The Guy Who’s Never Topped Sling Blade” Thornton; Made in Dagenham, a British period piece starring Sally Hawkins (Happy-Go-Lucky) as the woman who led her female coworkers in a strike for equal pay against the Ford Motor Company; 7 Days in Slow Motion, about an Indian tyke who fancies himself a Bollywood director; Sing!...

INDIE | A benefit for hail-battered Garfield Park Conservatory Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mahle has made lots of connections in the Chicago music scene, both in the hard-gigging Sybris and as a sound engineer (these days most often at Subterranean and Beat Kitchen), and he’s assembled a solid lineup—Sunken Ships are playing, of course, and Bobby Conn, Del Rey, Big Science, Bare Mutants, and DJ Scary Lady Sarah fill out the bill....

AP Photo/Seth Perlman Prisoners in a dormitory in Vandalia In most U.S. jails and prisons, inmates are counted several times a day. But surveys used to measure the nation’s economic well-being aren’t much interested in counting prisoners. And because the surveys ignore the incarcerated, the data from them “misrepresents the American social condition, especially as it concerns African American men,” sociologist Becky Pettit writes in her recent book, Invisible Men: Mass Incarceration and the Myth of Black Progress....

About ten years ago artist Lee Tracy created a “big wall of bad news.” After graduating from the School of the Art Institute in 1989 she had channeled her love of nature into minimal, abstracted landscapes. Then she began reading about the state of the environment and ended up covering a wall of her studio with news clips, stories on endangered species and global warming. Tracy decided she couldn’t work in the “cozy cocoon” of a studio anymore....

The title of the new Second City E.T.C. revue, We’re All in This Room Together, alludes to the theater lover’s mystic faith that something sacred happens when one set of human beings performs for another set of same in a common space in real time. It’s a sweet notion—especially now, when a “crowd” is defined as multiple mobile devices ranged in close proximity to one another. It can even be seen as a manifesto of sorts, calling for a world without tweet seats....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The other night I met up with a friend of mine at a bar a few blocks south of the Skyway and just west of the state line, in what was once Eddie Vrdolyak territory and more recently was the nerve center for Al Sanchez’s Hispanic Democratic Organization Southeast. (My friend Dan Mihalopoulos recently wrote a fine Tribune piece about politics in the neighborhood, starting with the mood at a another favorite spot, the Crow Bar....

On the surface, the city’s recent proposal to give a real estate consortium roughly $51 million to develop the old central post office looks like another unwarranted handout to the rich and well connected. But in fact this is one of the few tax increment financing deals that actually makes some sense–which just goes to show you how demented the program has become. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » So on May 8 the Community Development Commission, the body that oversees TIFs, recommended that the city fund a new but similar plan, giving Walton Street Capital LLC $51 million in property tax dollars to convert the old post office into office space, a luxury hotel, and condos....

A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE Writers’ Theatre Yet it also allows for resonances I’ve never encountered before in Tennessee Williams’s 1947 masterpiece. In Cromer’s version, the famous tale of Blanche DuBois’ sojourn with her sister, Stella, and Stella’s mechanic husband, Stanley Kowalski, becomes nothing less than a metaphor for squabbling America, awash in resentments and engaged in a death match over who gets to stay in Elysian Fields—which is not just the name of the rundown New Orleans street where the Kowalskis live but also, in Greek mythology, the ultimate destination of heroes....

AP Photo/M. Spencer Green President Obama speaking in Chicago last Friday. Bias against blacks has increased since his election in 2008. I sometimes hear from readers that discrimination against blacks, though lamentable, is largely a thing of the past. The readers who say this inevitably are white. It’s true that bias against African-Americans is less overt now than 40 years ago, when blacks moving into white neighborhoods were greeted with bricks through their picture windows....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For the second straight season, following their 2010 Stanley Cup championship, the Blackhawks were eliminated in the first round of the playoffs. Last season was sort of a hangover following the overspending of the previous title campaign, with the Hawks having to jettison players to get back under the salary cap, but even so they took the Vancouver Canucks to the seventh game of the opening round, where they lost in overtime to the team that eventually lost in the Cup finals, so it didn’t seem as if the required fixes were that dramatic....

Like most work by the video collective Everything Is Terrible!, a new film zooms in on the nastiest bits of slime that gather at the bottom of humanity’s media Dumpster. Comic Relief Zero is what people are thinking of when they say they don’t like stand-up, an art that can really bring out the worst in people. For instance: blond, mulleted Scott Wood, who combines prop comedy with Mexican stereotypes while doing a “Hispanic Star Trek” bit....

SEPTEMBER Thu13 “Juvenile-in-Justice” ●Visual Art● Guggenheim fellow Richard Ross presents his series of photos on youths going through the American juvenile justice system. He gives a talk at 6 PM at the reception. Reception Thu 9/13, 5-8 PM. Through 12/15: Mon-Fri 9 AM-5 PM, Sat 10 AM-4 PM, Roosevelt University, Gage Gallery, 18 S. Michigan, 312-341-6458, roosevelt.edu/gagegallery, free. Mon17 Nasty, Brutish & Short ●Theater● A puppet cabaret funded in part by Puppet Slam Network....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Fortunately, the staff at Time Out Chicago has seen fit to create a drinking game based on the infelicities of Blackstone’s prose. A few examples/excuses to drink: Drink anytime you find yourself saying “Yikes!” aloud while reading. Ex: “I inserted myself, gradually and suddenly, my cock jumping the Brazilian waxed turnstile, and plunged into the subway.” p. 119...

The 17th edition of the Asian American Showcase runs Friday, April 6, through Thursday, April 19, at Gene Siskel Film Center, with screenings of a dozen features and two shorts programs. The 2011 festival opened with Dave Boyle’s romantic comedy Surrogate Valentine, a tale of unrequited love starring San Francisco singer-songwriter Goh Nakamura as himself, and this year’s follows suit with the sequel, Daylight Savings. Dumped by his college professor girlfriend, the moody musician pursues a rebound romance with a fellow musician (Yea-ming Chen) of similarly ironic temperament....