Atlanta’s MASTODON has become so megalithic in the underground metal scene it’s hard to believe the forthcoming Blood Mountain (Warner Brothers) is only their third full-length. Most prog-metal bands concentrate on the high-end in their ambitious epics; Mastodon’s might is in the foundation. No one but no one uses drums quite like they do, with pounding so solid the songs are more landmass than music. Their first two records, Remission and Leviathan, were so meticulously, deeply layered you expected to find fossils in the bedrock....

Fifty-year-old French saxophonist Michel Doneda has been a presence in European improv circles for decades, but he’s relatively unknown in the U.S. He favors heavy abstraction and precise extended technique, not the fireworks better-known European free-jazz reedists like, but recently he’s found a natural niche within the bustling electroacoustic improv scene. On Strom (Potlatch), a collaborative album released last year, Doneda’s soprano and sopranino saxophones contribute to a sibilant conversation of hisses, high-frequency tones, and what sound like stomach rumblings; the sputtering of the radiators in my apartment fit right in....

Continued from last week … Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I come here to watch the karaoke. I can’t sing, but I scream really good, which reminds me of my reunion with my mother. I was living in LA and I got this e-mail saying that my dad had died and all was forgiven, move back to Chicago. I hadn’t seen my mother since running away from home at 13....

I read with interest Michael Miner’s recent article on our precious Great Lakes water supply [“They Need It. We Waste It,” January 13.]. Two observations. One. The Chicago “diversion” of 3,200 CFS to which he refers must include primarily the water taken into the Chicago offshore intake cribs. This water is treated and eventually finds its way south after it flows from our household spigots, toilets, yard hoses, fire hydrants, etc, thence into the sewage system, where it is again treated and at present partially released into the south-flowing river and canals....

It’s odd to break a good story only to see the readers you most wanted to reach blow it off. On October 27, as Republican congressman Jerry Weller rolled toward reelection in Illinois’ 11th District, the Reader reported on its front page that Weller’s apparently been buying up beachfront property in Nicaragua without disclosing it, in possible violation of the federal Ethics in Government Act. To give the story by freelancer Frank Smyth maximum exposure, the Reader posted it online on October 25....

The essence of Robert Harling’s 1987 play comes through in this production despite some underdeveloped supporting characters and flaws in delivery, like wildly uneven dialects and muddy diction. Set entirely in a true-to-life salon, Steel Magnolias celebrates the deep bonds shared by six small-town women who sustain each other through joy and sorrow. Allison M. Weiss’s vivacious, headstrong Shelby is the group’s vortex, drawing the ladies’ affection and concern and her mother’s protests when Shelby risks her life to have a child....

With a population more than 60 percent Hispanic, Logan Square is home to a predictable number of Mexican restaurants, but other, less mainstream Latin American culinary traditions are represented as well. What follows is a guide to some of the tiny restaurants, taquerias, and other holes-in-the-wall that dot the area. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Within a block or so of Taqueria Moran, vans parked along Milwaukee serve home-cooked Mexican chow to lines of regulars early on weekend mornings....

Friday 30 TAKING BACK SUNDAY The video for Taking Back Sunday’s 2002 single “Cute Without the ‘E’ (Cut From the Team)”–a Fight Club takeoff in which guitarist Fred Mascherino is beat to a bloody, smiling pulp by a roomful of hotties wearing tight wifebeaters–still stands as the best example of emo’s pathological self-obsession and lurking misogyny. But Adam Lazarra nearly matches that feat with his girl-threatening lyrics and hysterical shrieks on “MakeDamnSure,” the first single from the band’s new album, Louder Now (Warner Brothers)....

Jonathan Tolins’s seriocomic meditation on genetic engineering closed on Broadway in 1993 after 29 performances. I’m astonished it lasted that long. Preachy beyond endurance and nearly bereft of interesting characters, the play makes its simpleminded, heterophobic point early on: in Tolins’s world, an otherwise sensible straight couple would rather abort than have a gay child. Then he repeats it six or seven times. Tolins leavens the tale with a few trendy late-80s-style jokes about brand names, Ivan Boesky, and shopping–and some fascinating lectures about Wagner, delivered by the only three-dimensional character, the put-upon, creative (gay) David....

The PAC/edge Performance Festival (see the sidebar in Theater) isn’t long on music, but this showcase for the local improvised-music label False Walls promises to be a highlight. Tiny Hairs’ new album, Coldless, is a work of desolate beauty: violinist Peter Rosenbloom and guitarists Mark Booth and Jonathan Liss are wonderful at shaping their parts around one another’s, sometimes in interlocking patterns, sometimes in three-way solo explorations, but always with satisfying musicality; drummer Jim Lutes, upright bassist John DeVylder, and electronics guy Charles King alternately gird their elliptical patterns in loose-limbed grooves and strident noise....

Billy Hazelnuts The Tony Millionaire who gives out drinking advice to his fans is the creator of Maakies, a strip that appears among other places in the Reader and has a huge Internet fan base. Each week’s installment usually ends tragically for the heroes–Drinky and a monkey named Uncle Gabby–due to their own ineptitude and drunkenness. It’s full of poop jokes, minority stereotypes, poetry, and endings that mock Henny Youngman-style punch lines as much as they revel in them....

The setup for Miguel Mancillas’s 70-minute False Cognate is foreboding. Monica Kubli’s wonderfully textured set creates a small, high-ceilinged room with a tiny barred window high up on one wall. Ivonne Ortiz’s shifting lighting plays over the surface of this claustrophobic space, transforming it from a golden realm of possibility to a dark, menacing chamber. The score, commissioned from Chicago composer Corbett Lunsford, is alienating. Six dancers take turns center stage in the crowded performing area while the others watch or languish nearby, unconcerned....

Now in its 13th year, the Chicago Underground Film Festival features experimental, documentary, and narrative works by independent film and video makers. Screenings continue through Thursday, August 24, at the Music Box. Tickets are $8; a festival pass, good for all screenings, is $100. For more information visit www.cuff.org. In Loving Memory J.L. Aronson’s documentary on Daniel Smith and his siblings, who perform as the alt-rock Christian band the Danielson Famile, offers no juicy exposes of cultish faith or dysfunctional family dynamics, and nonfans may be put off by its relative lack of dramatic tension and soft-focus analog video, which paints the Smiths’ childhood, adolescence, and musical career in a sort of rosy-holy light....

Warning, reads the sign on the Indianapolis Boulevard bridge 19 miles southeast of the Loop in East Chicago, Indiana. UNSAFE WATERS. YOU SHOULD NOT SWIM IN THESE WATERS. YOU SHOULD NOT EAT FISH FROM THESE WATERS. The channel under the bridge is the Lake George branch of the Indiana Harbor Canal, which slowly empties into Lake Michigan. It’s still OK to toss a rock into the water, and if you do, bubbles swirl up, pop, and leave a rainbow slick....

The annual conference of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs takes place in Chicago March 24 through 27, and between that and Columbia College’s Story Week Festival, which started March 18, the town is lousy with writers, editors, publishers, and assorted hangers-on. The AWP conference is open to registrants only, but many participants are seizing the opportunity to throw extracurricular readings and parties this week and next. Following is a selective guide to Story Week- and AWP-related proceedings....

Peter Pan at the Apollo Theater Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Peter Pan’s first public incarnation was as a play in 1904. Barrie tinkered with the material over the years (he even penned the scenario for a proposed 1920 film starring Charlie Chaplin), and since his death in 1937 many others have had their way with the story. Most baby boomers grew up with the 1954 musical version that starred Mary Martin under Jerome Robbins’s direction, first shown on Broadway and then taped for TV; a touring revival of that show played here in 1998, starring Cathy Rigby as the most exciting, boyish Pan I’ve seen....

Poet Stephen Spender detected the “glaze and gleam of the modern” in the first Herbert List photographs he saw in Hamburg in 1929, and viewers of the 42 prints at Stephen Daiter can find those qualities in the stark chair and its shadow in Terrace by the Sea (1937). But List didn’t have a signature style; the boy in a doorway in Morning (1937), one of the photographer’s many homoerotic images, is seen through a transparent cloth, making him more sensual....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I didn’t know much about the differences. The busy packaging wasn’t much help and the company’s Web site implies a lot of overlap. Cage free? Sounds good. But what about the Certified Organic Eggs (“if you are concerned about man made chemicals in your diet and animal welfare”)? What’s the difference between “cage free” and “free roaming,” a lifestyle the organic chickens apparently enjoy?...

Ace director Beau O’Reilly keeps the first act of Scott T. Barsotti’s pretentious new drama from sinking under its own weight. But not even he (or Gil Rocha’s cool drawings on a black wall) can save the second act. The play begins as a seemingly existential dialogue between a fed-up husband and his recluse wife (a nice turn by Debbie Safeblade in this School of the Art Institute/Curious Theatre Branch production), who’s focused her paralyzing panic on a mysterious Chevy parked in front of their house....

As he’s gotten older, former Jefferson Airplane guitarist Jorma Kaukonen has returned to the traditional blues and gospel that first inspired him, but he still takes risks. His latest, Stars in My Crown (Red House), includes plenty of the stuff you’d expect from him these days–original takes on time-honored blues and gospel themes, plus rootsy covers of little-known gems, old and new–but he also delves into world music, poppy neo-gospel, and meandering instrumentals, with varying degrees of success....