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Courtey of the artist Jack Oblivian Thunderstorms and flash flooding—must be summer. Let’s hope we got the worst of it out of the way before all the outdoor music this weekend. Helping you sift through the festival frenzy is your trusty, if slightly smelly, jean-shirt-wearing friend, Soundboard. Spring Awakening takes over Soldier Field from Friday through Sunday, featuring Porter Robinson and the lot but also Chicago staples such as Flosstradamus and legends including Green Velvet and Paul Oakenfold....

A working-class accent and persona come easily to Irish-American Bill Burr. Fidgety and loose onstage, he saunters around with an unpretentious confidence. Though he lacks a gift for voices and impressions and suggests he wasn’t the smartest kid in school, he’s an engaging storyteller. In his Boston-area Catholic family his parents argued a lot, and his father would openly complain about his mom. Burr says his dad might begin, “Is it raining?...

Artistic director Wilfredo Rivera has invited outside choreographers to participate in the company’s inclusive “Latin Fire” show. Dionna PridGeon contributes an inventive two-part piece, as yet untitled, using music by the Buena Vista Social Club; the introspective first section represents the difficult time when the group was struggling for survival while the second, more upbeat part captures its renaissance. Michelle Manzanales of Luna Negra Dance Theater has choreographed Te Escogi Companera (“My Life Companion”), set to a raw-sounding song with lyrics from a Pablo Neruda poem about the virtues of a woman who’s lived close to the earth....

At a few minutes before 6 PM last Thursday, the temperature outside was hovering near zero, the wind was savage, and the Harris Theater for Music and Dance—where the Chicago Music Commission was about to convene its most important program yet—was nearly empty. It looked like there were going to be more people on the CMC’s 17-member panel than in the audience. But by the time moderator Dan Lurie finished introducing the lineup of local music industry experts, including producers, promoters, broadcasters, performers, club owners, and city officials, an audience of 130 had materialized....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Now that the city’s most famous marathon has taken place, the Music Box and the Portage Theater will respond with marathons of their own. Music Box of Horrors, which begins this Saturday at noon, and the Portage’s Massacre, which kicks off next Saturday, October 20, are 24-hour celebrations of horror, suspense, and otherwise spooky movies, each with its own dedicated programmers and fans....

Who knows what southeast Chicago is for? In her new book, Exit Zero: Family and Class in Postindustrial Chicago, Christine Walley talks mostly about what it was. Wisconsin Steel, where Walley’s father worked, shut down in 1980. He and other workers on his shift were sent home without explanation. Armed guards padlocked the factory gates, and Walley’s father, who died in 2005, never really had a stable job again. Walley is at the end of four generations who lived on the southeast side, though she’s not there anymore—a professor of anthropology, she lives in New England and teaches at MIT....

Concern for the Great Fred Anderson Some of the best, most fearless, primal music I have ever witnessed was at the Velvet Lounge. So, according to you, I killed 4 people because of my disdains for ambiguity and compromise? I read a lot of stupid things written about me, but this one takes the cake. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Wouldn’t a more pressing question be to ask why the Reader assigned someone to review this show, out of the dozens and dozens and dozens of shows going on in town right now?...

A taciturn ex-convict (nonprofessional actor Argentino Vargas) leaves prison after a 20-year sentence and crosses a tropical forest by boat and on foot to find his daughter. This 2004 feature is the second by Lisandro Alonso (La Libertad), a singular and essential figure of the Argentinean new wave; he’s not quite the minimalist some claim, but he can make the simple act of filming feel so monumental that storytelling seems secondary....

Jose Garces’s splashy homecoming from Philadelphia—where the Chicago-bred celeb launched two successful tapas restaurants in as many years—marks him as a sort of Spanish imperialist. But the chef isn’t stamping out his empire with a giant cookie cutter shaped like the Iberian Peninsula. His other restaurants have affinities for distinct Spanish regions (Andalusia and the Basque Country), and at this one, Mercat a la Planxa, signifiers of Catalan cuisine dot the menu: Spanish scallions (calçots), charred and served with romesco sauce (salbitxada); cured sausages like butifarra and fuet; and pa amb tomaquet, grilled tomato-garlic bread, to name a few....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A recent, very Boston-centric article floats the idea that being a fan of a winning team can lead to not just personal euphoria but greater confidence, productivity, and even (in the case of its being a winning NFL team) greater collective wealth. Especially after yesterday–when the Sox lost two of two and Paul Konerko* and the Cubs lived down to the 39th anniversary of the black cat curse–I’d be more interested in research into the psychology of fans who root who root for hard-luck teams....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If you’re reading this right now, the world didn’t end yesterday as you had feared or hoped. Or maybe it did, and we’re all living in a postapocalyptic hell that looks strikingly similar to every day that came before this one. In honor of the end, I asked Sarah Frier—Reckless Records lifer and charming local weirdo—about the fate of music in a postapocalyptic land....

Pit Er Pat, Lazer Crystal, Aleks & the Drummer INFO 773-525-2508 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Most bands are easy to sum up: “church-burning black metal,” for instance, or “a lot like Interpol.” Trying to describe Aleks & the Drummer is like trying to describe a digital photo one pixel at a time–it’s hard to get across the whole picture without piling up a lot of information....

[Plus: How to Drink With Dessert: In time for Valentine’s Day, we asked local experts to help us appreciate wine’s sweet side.] Bistro 110 An a la carte French-themed menu including Maine lobster bisque with salmon caviar and grilled venison chops with parsnip puree and red wine sauce. For dessert a champagne cocktail trio pairs with three desserts. Also available Thursday through Saturday. 110 E. Pearson, 312-266-3110, bistro110restaurant.com. Carnivale Specials include a 32-ounce prime rib eye for two, chocolate empanadas, and Dom Perignon by the glass....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the mid-90s, after a series of big-time Big Ten flops in the men’s NCAA basketball tournament, a host of experts and critics said the league hadn’t adjusted to the younger, quicker game epitomized by the programs at Duke, Kentucky, Florida, Arizona, and North Carolina. But others noted that just a few years earlier, the Big Ten had been among the more dominant conferences in the country, featuring Michigan’s Fab Five as well as great teams from Indiana, Ohio State, and Illinois....

The protagonist in Mark Medoff’s intelligent drama about fame and family is a widow who refuses to connect with other people. Catherine is a charismatic teacher grown weary of the world who first withdraws from the classroom. Later, her husband’s death increases her longing for isolation. Yet her interactions with other characters must propel the story–a challenge that proves too difficult for the Infamous Commonwealth Theatre. John Wilson’s star-shaped set is too obviously symbolic and consumes too much space....

A couple years ago, I reentered the dating world after about a year of being attached. For the record, I’m not good at dating. I’m terribly shy. So as many people do, I turned to OkCupid. After a couple days, I had a date set up. The girl seemed nice based on the e-mails and text messages we exchanged. We asked readers to submit their least romantic stories for our Valentine’s Day issue....

A low point in Barack Obama’s presidency was reached when both his previous secretaries of defense said he’d bungled Syria. Leon Panetta said it was a mistake to threaten an attack and not follow through: “When the president of the United States draws a red line, the credibility of this country is dependent on him backing up his word.” Robert Gates said it was a mistake to even threaten an attack, because if we did attack, “in the eyes of a lot of people we become the villain instead of [Syrian president Bashar al-]Assad....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Where exactly it all went wrong for Cook County is a matter for great debate, some of which occurred in the meeting this afternoon led by finance committee chairman John Daley. Some commissioners and county officials chalked it up to the waste and poor judgment of other commissioners and county officials. Budget staff blamed Chicago’s professional sports teams, whose recent mediocre performances have led to diminished amusement tax revenues....

At first glance, Nick Thune is a tad precious. Well dressed enough that he could get away with ordering a manhattan at a Walkmen concert, he has a twinkle in his eye that plays nicely with his boyish looks and salon-cut hairdo. And like Demitri Martin—who can border on adorable—Thune tells jokes over the gentle strumming of an acoustic guitar. He plays nothing in particular, but it gives his set a flow that helps him avoid the awkwardness of changing topics from one joke to the next....

Lee Hyla has been the Harry and Ruth Wyatt Professor of Theory and Composition at Northwestern’s Bienen School of Music since 2007, and in that capacity he’s helped nurture the ongoing bloom of fierce, forward-looking contemporary-classical ensembles in Chicago. But he also writes gripping music of his own, something he makes vibrantly clear on the recent My Life on the Plains. The CD collects three works performed by Boston’s Firebird Ensemble, each of which draws from a very different source of inspiration: Polish Folk Songs is a jaunty, jump-­cutting three-part suite adapting music that Hyla fell in love with on a visit to the town of Zakopane; Field Guide is a musical conversation involving the songs of birds from around the globe; and the title piece, named after the autobiography of George Custer, is a marvel of recycled and mutated riffs, rigorous unison passages, and piano clusters worthy of Cecil Taylor....