Chain, the first solo feature by film and video artist Jem Cohen, is a strange mix of documentary and fiction about malls and similar commercial spaces. It’s meditative rather than action packed, and the creepiness it exposes has as much to do with absence as presence. But it deserves more attention than the single local screening it’s getting at Columbia College. I suspect it’s not getting more because it was partly funded by European television, because distributors never know how to package films that merge documentary and fiction, and because it belongs to the netherworld between film and art (it’s playing in conjunction with the Museum of Contemporary Photography’s exhibition “Manufactured Self”)....

The members of Los Lobos have worked as hard as anybody to advance the notion that a great band is an omnivorous band. That’s not necessarily the compliment it might first seem to be; the kitchen-sink approach also produces undercooked Ryan Adams albums and overstuffed OutKast discs. But Los Lobos have made their eclecticism sound sensible and natural, and during the mid-90s they made a solid case for themselves as the best band in the country....

1872 N. Damen Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A long crack runs across the concrete floor in Michelle Tan’s new boutique, but she doesn’t mind. “Life is not perfect,” says the 29-year-old designer, and neither are her garments, which she generally likes to leave with a few unfinished seams. Because Tan sticks with basic colors like black, white, cream, and beige, she lets herself go crazy with texture–sewing a couple dozen folded squares of material cut out with pinking shears to the hem of a skirt, say, or constructing a jacket out of fabric made from clumps of pale wool and bits of cashmere....

Fake IDs are for chump kids with shitty bands. Twenty-year-old singer and guitarist Miss Alex White–already a veteran of five different groups, including the Hot Machines, a three-piece with Jered Gummere of the Ponys and Matt Williams of the Baseball Furies–has been carving her name on the walls of local clubs for years. In mid-2004 she released a 12-inch on In the Red that captured a primal, guttural live show at the Double Door, her last with drummer Chris Saathoff (aka Chris Playboy), who’d been killed in a hit-and-run accident that February....

This isn’t a bad little place for tequila, but I have a memory of coming here when it was the Holiday Club that no amount of tequila can erase. A coworker and I decided to invite these two women out, and it became a night of enthusiastic drinking that eventually brought us here. When we left, the bar was closing. We walked outside, and there was a light rain coming down and we were trying to find a cab when I saw this street sign on the corner....

Regarding the article “HotHouse Moves On” [The Meter, September 22], members of the HotHouse community still have many unanswered questions about the recent actions of the board of directors of CIPEX (the Center for International Performance and Exhibition). The disagreement over hiring a business manager was only part of the story. Here are a few questions I have had: What will be so different now that Marguerite Horberg is no longer there?...

I first saw the Redwalls at a loft in Pilsen in early 2003, back when they were called the Pages. They were still teenagers–most of them are only barely of drinking age now–and their set was largely Dylan and Beatles covers, played with a surplus of charm and enthusiasm. Since then the boys from Deerfield have been through the major-label wringer–the kind of thing that’s squeezed the life out of many a young band–but I get the same feeling from their new third album, The Redwalls, that I got watching them tear up that loft party almost five years ago....

In Richard Greenberg’s Tony-winning comedy, now in a crisp production by About Face Theatre in partnership with Steppenwolf, baseball is a metaphor for the best and worst of America. The play ostensibly focuses on a multiracial Derek Jeter-style superstar, Darren Lemming, who comes out to his team and the press. Though his teammates pretend to be supportive in public, in private they pull away from him, while the fans accuse him of defiling baseball....

Improvisation in Chicago seems to have entered a Rube Goldberg phase. The greatest creative challenge facing an improviser now has less to do with making something wonderful right away than with developing a wildly convoluted mechanism to contain it. Hence The Big Yellow Bus, which on the night I attended involved (a) a pair of guest emcees who (b) performed a woozy kind of neo-Smothers Brothers act that supplied (c) inspiration for (d) a quartet of women and (e) a quintet of men who eventually combined into (f) a nontet that (g) built on everything that went before–including a bit about (h) a four-and-a-half-year-old girl who orders a margarita–to (i) entertain people....

It’s a staple of ghost stories, horror films, spooky TV shows, and creepy books. And I suppose for someone with a heart condition, it may well be true. But can a young, healthy person be literally scared to death, without any physical cause? –Rebecca S., Seattle Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sudden death due to stress has been reported throughout history. Physician George Engel, in a 1971 review in Annals of Internal Medicine, notes that in the New Testament the apostle Peter tells Ananias, “You have lied not to man but to God,” whereupon Ananias and later his wife Sapphira fall down dead....

What happens if a werewolf bites a vampire? Or vice versa? –Steve, Wichita, Kansas Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Science having let us down, we’re obliged to seek insight in legend and art, the latter admittedly somewhat loosely construed, e.g., the work of George Romero. Take the matter of vampires versus werewolves. The literature and films of old rarely mention the two in the same story, although they appear to have much in common....

Notre musique Jean-Luc Godard has had a tendency to be combative and obscure. He’s a lot calmer and steadier in his latest feature, Notre musique, opening this week at the Music Box. He’s also been making an effort to express his intentions clearly and simply in interviews, including those with the mainstream American press. Yet some viewers will probably still feel excluded and puzzled by his methods as a filmmaker and his habits as a thinker, however beautiful and powerful the results....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “The fact that some types of labor (e.g. factory workers and custodians) have been subjected to international competition through globalization, while other types of labor have remain largely protected from competition (e.g. doctors, lawyers, economists, and newspaper columnists) was not an accident. It was a deliberate decision by U.S. trade negotiators from both political parties. Trade deals like NAFTA were designed to place U....

The Andersonville Galleria brings indie marketing to the north side, with nearly 50 craftspeople, designers, and artists renting retail space month-to-month in a newly rehabbed building just north of Foster. When the second floor opens next year, that number is expected to double. There’s a little bit of everything here: food (Terry’s Toffee, in flavors like “lemon paradise” and “lavenilla”), art (I particularly liked Scott Fishman’s color-saturated photographs, including one of a cloudy sky and its reflection in the curved surface of the Bean), and of course clothes and accessories....

“Right down there,” says Brian Krumm, front man for noirish roots-rock combo the Great Crusades. “It happened a week after I moved to Chicago.” He’s sitting by the window of Wicker Park’s Pontiac Cafe, pointing toward North Avenue and the spot where he was mugged nearly eight years ago. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The robbery inspired “Are We Having Fun Anymore?,” the opening track on the Great Crusades’ fifth album, Four Thirty, released in February by the German label Glitterhouse....

Family First? There are exceptions. Francine Spiegel’s only preoccupation is what childbirth does to a perfectly good body. Her mixed-media “pelts” look like the combined contents of a baby’s stomach and a new mother’s psyche, vomited up together on a wall. Albert Chong, meanwhile, uses a corridorlike area to create a completely unironic shrine to his family, unusual for its mixed Chinese and African ancestry. The shrine comprises six photographic still lifes–mostly arrangements of old snapshots splashed with artfully strewn flowers–three of which are matted in copper decorated with iconic images representing the Chong clan’s intercontinental heritage....

Bay Area saxist Francis Wong plays burly tenor lines with a burred tone, slippery rhythm, and frequent sly references to his Asian heritage. He’s showcased these qualities on several discs on Asian Improv Records, a label he cofounded, as well as during frequent visits to Chicago, whose free-music history has inspired him. (Indeed, his work readily suggests the strong influence of two Chicago tenor legends, Fred Anderson and Von Freeman.) For this show Wong will perform with his rarely assembled Legends & Legacies ensemble in its Chicago debut....

Jacques Demy’s first and in some ways best feature (1961, 90 min.), shot in exquisite black-and-white ‘Scope by Raoul Coutard, is among the most neglected major works of the French New Wave. Abandoned by her sailor lover, a cabaret dancer (Anouk Aimee) brings up their son while awaiting his return and ultimately has to choose among three men. Chock-full of film references (to The Blue Angel, Breathless, Hollywood musicals, the work of Max Ophuls, etc) and lyrically shot in Nantes, the film is a camera stylo love letter, and Michel Legrand’s lovely score provides ideal nostalgic accompaniment....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As usual, a fascinating array of writers will give talks, and this year the main focus is on conflict in the Middle East. There are always a few musical events included in the programming, but with the exception of experimental San Francisco vocalist Pamela Z, none this year are very interesting or unique. Good old Joan Baez is representing the protest tradition, but come on–it’s 2006!...

Nothing Feels Good: Punk Rock, Teenagers, and Emo by Andy Greenwald (St. Martin’s Griffin) Interspersing cultural commentary with historical background, artist profiles, and some painfully earnest testimony from citizens of the emo nation past and present, Greenwald gives this frequently misunderstood phenomenon a serious and empathetic treatment, addressing the who, what, when, where, and how of emo. Why, though, is another story. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Carrabba’s sway over his fans is remarkable....