The Aquarium | The Aquarium | Dischord Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Listening to the debut from this Portland five-piece, I imagined them as a misfit girl gang: there’d be the goth one, the punk, the new waver, the metal chick, the tuff singer in a sparkly outfit. The music is ultimate rad, a mishmash of Benatar-dramatic vocals, makeshift proggery, and naif disco–plus it’s obvious they grew up seeing Sleater-Kinney shows on the regular....

God bless the neighborhood bar. Local dives abound in Chicago, and each is a guaranteed trip to what-the-fuck-land, a place where those guys who normally hang out near highway exits come in to sell tube socks, a punk-rock dude gives in and swigs the packaged goods he meant to take home, it’s OK if Tina Turner’s “Private Dancer” comes on the jukebox twice in a row, and a Latino man in a T-shirt embroidered with an American flag knows one word to “Sweet Home Alabama”–and it’s “Alabama....

Though Apparat (aka Sascha Ring) is rarely cited as a leading light of Berlin’s microhouse scene, his new jawn, Orchestra of Bubbles (Bpitch Control), may be just the thing to turn attention his way. A collaboration with his longtime girlfriend, Ellen Allien, whom he’s previously remixed (no double entendre intended), the record is urgent club glitz with a dark bent and a sexy, pulsing, 4 AM vibe. Switching between electro-bounce and Neu Deutsch synth with casual aplomb, Apparat isn’t afraid to let his music be linear and generous....

In a sentence. Alice Camille, writing in U.S. Catholic (August): “The deadliest sin in America is probably avarice, but it’s also the least confessed according to every priest I’ve ever talked to.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “My wealth is not only a product of my own hard work,” successful software entrepreneur Martin Rothenberg (Syracuse Language Systems) is quoted as saying at responsiblewealth.org. “It also resulted from a strong economy and lots of public investment, both in others and in me....

I’m pretty sure I fall outside the Cupid Players’ target demographic. Judging by this show’s content, the troupe’s ideal audience member is young enough to be weirded out by the thought of his parents having sex but old enough to worry that he’s starting to act like his dad. He dreads romantic rejection almost as much as he fears commitment. And he’s not above a hand of strip solitaire. A longtime married man with kids, I don’t merely fail to fit the profile–I may be its antithesis....

The eighth annual European Union Film Festival, with entries from all 25 member states, continues Friday, March 11, through Thursday, March 24, at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, 312-846-2800. Tickets are $9, $7 for students, and $5 for Film Center members. Following are listings through Thursday, March 17; a full schedule is available online at www.chicagoreader.com. Brides South Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The manager of a laundry, artfully played by Monic Hendrickx, gradually turns into a monster in this 2004 Dutch drama....

Beethoven’s only opera is a masterpiece, yet it hasn’t been performed in Chicago since 1981. Few sopranos can do a great Leonore, and Florestan, who doesn’t appear until late in the show, has to sing an extremely demanding aria without having warmed up. Beethoven struggled from 1805 to 1814 with this tale of hope, love, courage, and freedom, which has the bold heroism of his Fifth Symphony and the warmth and lyricism of his Sixth....

Bohemian Nights Info 773-527-1234 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jerry Springer–The Opera sets trash talk to a quasi-operatic score (“poop your pants” is a typical lyric) and finds grand melodrama in Springer’s orchestrated sleaze. The production, which debuted at London’s National Theatre in April 2003, opens on a TV set, then moves to purgatory and hell, where a parade of program guests, including a diapered tenor and a cheating lover, reappear as religious figures like Jesus (who’s “a bit gay”) and God himself....

Memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki hang like a radioactive cloud over this 1954 Japanese feature, which was dubbed, radically recut, politically neutered, and heavily augmented with new footage for its U.S. release as Godzilla, King of the Monsters. Though Hollywood pioneered the atomic-monster movie a year earlier with The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, director Ishiro Honda had served in the imperial army, witnessed the firebombing of Tokyo, and passed through the ruins of Hiroshima in the aftermath of its destruction, which might account for the surprisingly somber and haunting sequence in a triage unit after Godzilla has flattened Tokyo....

Terragusto Cafe & Local Market Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Terragusto, a new Italian cafe and market in Roscoe Village, is a neighborhood restaurant so casual that the waiters eat their staff meal out front and the chef personally serves and apologizes for a late appetizer. It also happens to serve house-made pasta as good as–what the hell–any in Chicago. Owner and chef Theo Gilbert, who’s worked at Spiaggia and Trattoria No....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Brittany Ossenfort complained to an Orlando TV news reporter in July that her former roommate Richard Philips had assumed her identity when recently arrested and jailed on a prostitution charge, giving authorities her name, date of birth, and address instead of his own. According to Ossenfort, when she first befriended Philips she never suspected he wasn’t a woman (“He doesn’t even have an Adam’s apple”), and it wasn’t until more than a year later–during which time he gradually adopted her hairstyle and wardrobe–that she figured it out....

Industrial’s early-90s breach of the mainstream introduced a child of darkness and a child of light: Al Jourgensen, whose sadism eventually collapsed in on itself like a black hole, and Trent Reznor, whose cold-glow masochism sometimes approaches a truly transcendent self-abjection. When Pretty Hate Machine broke, I was more than a little skeptical of Reznor’s injured-adolescent poetics, and his forays into thrash seemed to echo the wrong turn Ministry made after The Land of Rape and Honey....

There’s a portal inside a garbage can that leads to Shangri-la via hell, and No Age are hanging out there eating grapes. Or at least that’s the only scene I can imagine where this LA duo might make any sense. They get their jazzy swagger from a silly little hi-hat, their scary gutter-punk vibe from the biggest cement-mixer guitar riffs ever, and right when it all starts to click, the bottom drops out and shit gets sadistic....

This Blindfaith Theatre mounting of Miguel Pinero’s raw 1974 prison drama is only marginally better than Urbantheater Co.’s failed production a few months ago. But that small margin makes a significant difference. Nicolas Minas’s more precise direction clarifies interactions that were garbled by Urbantheater, conferring a necessary touch of human pain on the story of a child molester’s brief, exceedingly unpleasant day in prison. While Minas and company don’t come anywhere near encompassing Pinero’s world–especially on a political level–they nevertheless put on a respectable, fitfully affecting show....

Robert Bruegmann went to Paris as a graduate student in the 1970s to study 18th-and 19th-century architecture. But when he flew in and out of Orly Airport, on the city’s southern edge, he saw something that blew his mind: a cityscape that looked like suburban Chicago or LA. European cities, he thought, were supposed to be pedestrian friendly, not like our monstrous agglomerations of auto-dependent sprawl. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

The guys in Mahjongg are happy to tell you all about themselves, as long as it’s OK if they make some of it up. “We like to keep certain things secret,” says Hunter Husar, who plays bass and runs a laptop for the mostly local outfit, but that doesn’t account for their tall tales about how they met at Burning Man or how they’re all Hare Krishnas. Sometimes they try to convince other bands on the bill they’re part of a religious sex cult....

A few weeks ago a City Hall source gave me a CD filled with the 2005 annual reports for the 143 tax increment financing districts in Chicago, and over the last few days it’s been a source of delight for me and other TIF geeks awed by the sheer scope of this scheme. I mean, on one level you have to hand it to city officials: they’re siphoning some $400 million a year in property taxes away from the schools, parks, libraries, etc, into off-budget slush funds, insisting all along that they’re not raising our taxes....

The explosion of funk-punk bands in the past year or so has clogged the indie ranks with armies of copycats and carpetbaggers–even Gang of Four, who arguably invented the sound more than 25 years ago, have reunited. It would be a shame, though, if the Watchers were casually lumped in with the Johnny-come-latelies; front man Michael Guarrine has been trying to jump-start the genre since the mid-90s with local outfits Assembly Line People Program and the Hex....

Swiss tubaist Marc Unternahrer provided the inspiration for the exchange noted in this foursome’s moniker, but the group’s album, Several Lights (Delmark), is ultimately a landmark for Chicago music: it’s a fantastic album of free improvisation, one of the most powerful statements yet by the wave of post-Ken Vandermark players who gravitated here in the late 90s. Unternahrer, a dazzling player whose extended technique on his unwieldy ax conveys a low, trombonely range and a great deal of blubbery-sound imagination, spent five months here in 2002 as part of the Chicago Sister Cities International Program, quickly hooking up with a large crew of local players....

Joncarl Lachman, executive chef of the gourmet carryout store Urban Epicure, won the San Pellegrino Almost Famous Chef award in 2002. He’s worked at New York’s Inside restaurant with Anne Rosenzweig, the influential chef who helped marry haute cuisine to traditional American cooking. His recipes have appeared in Wine X magazine. But his latest accomplishment might seem most impressive of all: he’s getting people to eat brussels sprouts. Best of Chicago voting is live now....