Chicago’s first Venezuelan restaurant is easy to miss–CARACAS GRILL is a small space sandwiched between an upholstery store and a gas station on North Clark. It’s worth searching for, if only to discover specialties unlike the Argentinean or Peruvian dishes offered at other local South American eateries. There are empanadas, but they’re big and fluffy, made with superfine white corn flour imported from Venezuela. The arepas aren’t the pancakelike disks Chicagoans might be used to but come stuffed two inches thick with smoky ham, tender and earthy roasted pork, shredded chicken, fish, or vegetables....

Bhabi’s Kitchen, half a block south of Devon and a block east of Western, serves up a blend of Pakistani and Indian cuisines that reflects the backgrounds of the restaurant’s proprietors: chef Qaisera “Bhabi” Qureshi is from the Pakistani side of the Punjab, and her husband, Qudratullah Syed, is from Hyderabad, in southern India. The menu features more than a dozen flatbreads–made from sorghum, millet, corn, chickpea, wheat, and white flours–as well as flavorful dishes like biryani mutton (with goat meat) and an aromatic chana daal....

Somehow I had the impression that aerial dance was all about the feats. Boy, was I wrong. In an hour-long piece called Rolling Blackouts, choreographer-director Shayna Swanson takes a somewhat ragtag group of 12 performers and molds their vignettes on rings, trapezes, silks, and bungee cords into a meditation on the perils and pleasures of vulnerability. Using the conceit of a power outage, Swanson explores her own fears of losing her vision (she has severe astigmatism)....

Robert Towne, screenwriter of Chinatown, reaches further back into Los Angeles history for this dreamy adaptation of John Fante’s autobiographical novel about his early years as a struggling writer. Set in the Bunker Hill neighborhood during the Depression, it focuses mainly on the hero’s troubled affair with a Mexican waitress, played out as a kind of erotic grudge match between Colin Farrell and Salma Hayek. Towne, who also directed, romanticizes the material yet preserves Fante’s critique of his own anti-Mexican bias–an attempt to cover his sensitivity about being Italian-American....

Atlanta’s favorite messes play the kind of bluesy, ramshackle garage rock you might’ve heard 40 years ago from the first kids who ever made fun of hippies–on the back cover of their third album, Let It Bloom (In the Red), muddy blue Haight-Ashbury flowers surround a drawing of a hanged man with a crow perched thoughtfully on the end of the gibbet. “Hippie, Hippie, Hoorah”–their snickering take on a song first recorded in 1967 by future film star Jacques Dutronc–borrows some of the orientalist decadence and confused self-loathing of the Animals’ version of “House of the Rising Sun,” and the whole album sizzles with smart-assed misanthropy so shameless and rambunctious it’s almost cute....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Chicago Recycling Coalition and other advocates praise the Blue Cart program but wonder why it’s taking so long to expand it citywide. “We don’t need more pilots–we know what works. Now we need to roll it out everywhere,” said Julie Dick, a member of the coalition’s board of directors. “The more they roll it out on a citywide basis, the easier it is to educate people on how to recycle....

Burying the Bomb The Sun-Times wasn’t the only paper to misjudge the news. The New York Times put its version of the AP story on page 22 of the national edition on December 6, and plenty of other papers didn’t think the story deserved page one. The Tribune properly topped its front page with the headline “9/11 panel: U.S. not safe,” but it still fell short. The Tribune borrowed its story from the Washington Post, and there was no sidebar covering the Chicago angle–as if a report giving the government a D for cargo and luggage screening and an F for communication between first responders didn’t suggest one....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Why does Daniel Burnham appeal even to critics who don’t care for his monumental vision of an all-classical city? Northwestern University historian Carl Smith explains in his new book, The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City. Burnham’s big plan expressed our desire “to reach beyond piecemeal solutions and act efficaciously on the grandest scale,” he writes....

On Let It Go! (JSP), her most recent disc, Chicago-based blues singer Deitra Farr comes as close as she ever has to capturing the range and stylistic flair she brings to her live performances. Unlike too many screamers and melisma-mad show-offs, Farr prefers understatement: her delivery of “Signs, Signals, and Warnings,” a meditation on a failed love affair, is smoldering and haunted; on “I’m Through With It,” a soul-drenched blues that recalls Stax-era Albert King (a feeling enhanced by Billy Flynn’s keening guitar bends), she conveys her outrage by tightening her voice like a fist....

In the summer of 2001 Vice President Dick Cheney’s staff invited a group of environmentalists over to the Old Executive Office Building to talk about building more fuel-efficient automobiles. Frank told them small cars aren’t the problem. The problem is SUVs plowing into small cars. “If you allow half the population–and usually it’s the wealthier half–to have big vehicles,” he said, “then you allow more big vehicles on the road, and it’s less safe for small cars....

The hipster fascists at Vice have a monopoly on downtown cool that can make you feel like an asshole just for being born. But in a weird way the monthly magazine–which started ten years ago in Montreal as a low-budget skate, graffiti, and culture mag and has now spawned a record label, books, and Vice stores in LA, New York, Toronto, and London–speaks to your inner snob, the person who plays fashion cop in bars and who sometimes thinks, “Yes, I am better than everyone else....

This peculiar musical by James Webber, David Church, and Joe Patrick Ward creates a kind of celebrity purgatory where Judy Garland hosts a Christmas special featuring other dead people, including Liberace, Joan Crawford, Lillian Hellman, and Richard Nixon. We’re not told this little variety hour is being transmitted from the great beyond, however, until after intermission, when the grim reaper arrives and everything suddenly gets very solemn. The transition from affectionate parody to pop-culture metaphysics is so jarring that even the performers in this Chicago premiere by Hell in a Handbag Productions seem uncomfortable....

On their new No Wow (Rough Trade/RCA), the Kills sound more like classic P.J. Harvey than Polly Jean herself does these days. Though the London duo can’t match the complexity of Harvey’s lyrics, they know how to work with what they’ve got. In a deep-down sex-choked moan, singer VV (aka Alison Mosshart) conjures a mixture of dread and languor, a David Lynch road-movie world where desire is never more than a coin flip away from repulsion....

Schwa Carlson, the 31-year-old chef and owner of Schwa, opened his 28-seat restaurant in the former Lovitt space last fall, and in a kitchen the size of a Wicker Park bedroom has been honing a progressive American cuisine that’s surprisingly creative and refined. A Glen Ellyn native, Carlson dropped out of the Culinary and Hospitality Institute of Chicago about eight years ago to learn to cook the old-fashioned way, doing a series of “stages”–brief apprenticeships–over the course of three trips to Europe....

Lots of noise bands sound like they want to chew through your spine and spit out your vertebrae, but Metalux takes a deliberately calm approach that’s even more frightening. Immerse yourself in this Chicago duo’s newest album, Waiting for Armadillo (Load), and you’ll gradually become uncomfortable in your skin, painfully conscious of your body and its terrible fragility. Armadillo is dramatically heavy and moody–nothing new for these ladies–but while their past recordings seemed to simply wander in the darkness, this one settles into a particular locale long enough for details to come into focus....

The defining spirit and driving force of the AACM, pianist Muhal Richard Abrams set out on his own path more than 40 years ago, believing that compliance with the artistic and economic norms of the jazz world would prevent him from making the choices that most interested him. As the decades passed and those groundbreaking choices influenced generations of players, Abrams remained an iconoclast, avoiding complacence and defying expectations about genre or style....

Golf is supposed to be the most unfair sport, where even a good shot can yield unfortunate results due to a bad bounce. Yet during the first month of the baseball season the Chicago team that played the best baseball, won the most games, and entered May in first place was the one slighted and ignored where fans were concerned. The White Sox had every right to complain that life isn’t fair....

Raising Hamid Drake, who plays trap set and frame drums on the disc, moves easily between Western jazz and the percussion traditions of Africa, the Caribbean, and the Middle East. He’s sought after both at home and abroad, and his recordings and collaborations number in the hundreds; he’s worked with everyone from Don Cherry to Herbie Hancock, Bill Laswell to Pharoah Sanders. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Born in Monroe, Louisiana, in 1955, Drake was brought to Waukegan the following year to live with his aunt and uncle....

This annual showcase of experimental theater, performance, and music from Chicago’s fringe, coproduced by Curious Theatre Branch and Prop Thtr, runs through 11/4. This year features two full-length trilogies, “The Madelyn Trilogy” by Beau O’Reilly and the “Danger Face Trilogy” by Idris Goodwin. Admission is $15 or “pay what you can,” except where noted. Performances take place at the Prop Thtr, 3502 N. Elston, and the Athenaeum Theatre, 2936 N. Southport, and elsewhere as noted below....

One of the less publicized effects of Hurricane Katrina was that it washed bassist, composer, and conductor Matt Golombisky onto the shores of Chicago. In New Orleans, Golombisky had played in as many as a dozen bands at a time; here he’s not only kept up a similar pace but also runs a record label and organizes an annual festival, both of which bear the name Ears and Eyes. Best of Chicago voting is live now....