Cat Power Two of the more complicated women in indie rock have just gone all Dusty in Memphis on us. Chan Marshall recorded Cat Power’s The Greatest (Matador) with a veteran session crew, anchored by Hi Records house-band siblings Teenie and Flick Hodges, at Memphis’s Ardent Studios–the birthplace of Sam & Dave’s “Soul Man” and the Staple Singers’ “I’ll Take You There” (and, lest we forget, 3 Doors Down’s “Kryptonite”). And on her first solo album, Rilo Kiley front woman Jenny Lewis blends her vocals with the buttery harmonies of the Louisville-bred Watson Twins on Rabbit Fur Coat (Team Love), which is modeled after Laura Nyro’s 1971 soul dalliance, a collaboration with LaBelle called Gonna Take a Miracle....

Lead Story Super-Recidivists Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In January, according to Atlanta police, 20-year-old Nathaniel Lee Stanley was released from Fulton County Jail (charges against him, which included violation of controlled-substance laws, had been dismissed) and immediately drove off in an SUV he carjacked in the jail’s parking lot. And in March Kelly Handy, 37, retrieved some personal belongings that were held by Wheat Ridge, Colorado, police after her arrest the previous week on charges including burglary and forgery....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Michael McPhail, 26, was arrested in Spanaway, Washington, in October after his wife told police she’d caught him having sex with the couple’s four-year-old female pit bull (and allegedly provided cell-phone photos to back up her claim). McPhail is believed to be the first person charged under the state’s new bestiality law, passed after a man died last year in Enumclaw while having sex with a horse....

A secret agreement that benefits only Mayor Daley. A mysterious side issue that stops a settlement in its tracks. Lawyers refusing to talk because of a gag order that nobody ordered. What’s going on? Why doesn’t the city settle with three victims of police torture and stop paying private attorneys public money to negotiate with them? aThey wouldn’t pursue Daley’s deposition. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » According to the plaintiffs’ attorneys, and as we reported in July, the two sides came to terms last November 3....

Chief among the inelegant oddities framing this Pretty Blue Sky production of Coward’s frothy classic is the way the title’s been stenciled, in deco lettering, on one wall of the set. One assumes it’s there to remind viewers which play they’re watching. Other discordant notes include overdeliberate pacing–looking for meaning where there’s precious little, the actors seldom achieve the clip that’s the baseline for the piece’s rat-a-tat rhythms–and the space’s echo-chamber effect, which drowns the glittering dialogue and imparts a murky distance to what should be immediate and crisp....

Since the first reports of Chicago police torture surfaced a quarter century ago the list has swelled to nearly 200 cases involving dozens of public employees—and still no one has been prosecuted. Now, with the results of a four-year, multimillion dollar investigation due any day, here’s a guide by staff reporter John Conroy to the key figures in the scandal. Some of them may look familiar. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Joey Slotnick and Lauren Katz cut their teeth in the mid-90s with the well-respected improv ensemble ED, and have a slew of TV and film credits between them, so I guess they’re entitled to some of the hype surrounding their new show, a long-form theatrical improvisation. But despite their undeniable rhythm and rapport, the night I attended these old pros got snared in a thicket of sophomoric object work and mirror games, never developing interesting relationships or overarching themes....

Ventrella’s Caffe Ventrella, whose grandparents emigrated from Italy in the 1920s and ’30s, modeled his cafe on the establishments in Chicago’s old Italian neighborhoods. “I wanted to pick up a store from Harlem Avenue in, like, 1950 and just drop it here on Damen,” he says–hence the many vintage pieces, such as a red-and-chrome cistern sink from a 1930s-era Pullman car and a fridge from the mid-’50s. “I want somebody to walk in here and go, ‘Has this place been here forever?...

Permanent Records Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When your house starts to look like a record store, maybe it’s time to open one. So decided former record-shop clerks Liz Tooley and Lance Barresi, who moved here from Columbia, Missouri, in August. They secured a space in Ukrainian Village in September and in two weeks turned a 1,400-square-foot white box with track lighting into Permanent Records, a homey boutique with robin’s-egg blue walls, homemade forest green record and CD bins, and mod plastic chairs adorned with granny-chic-tapestry throw pillows....

The festival continues this weekend with screenings October 26 through 28 at the Wilmette, 1122 Central, Wilmette. Some highlights follow, all in subtitled Hebrew and other languages. For more information call 847-675-3378 or visit chicagofestivalofisraelicinema.org. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Aviva My Love (107 min.) picked up six awards at Israel’s Oscars, including best picture, best actress (Assi Levy), and best director (Shemi Zarhin, who also did Bonjour Monsieur Shlomi)....

This production of Verdi’s Il Trovatore, with its convoluted plot about two warring men who don’t know they’re brothers and who love the same woman, is filled with fantastic singing. Mezzo Dolora Zajick’s portrayal of the vengeful gypsy Azucena is spellbinding from her first notes to her last glorious outburst–she moves her heavy voice with great agility and has a tremendous chest voice and a dazzling upper register. She’s also a thoroughly convincing actress....

Early on, Karen Finley’s fierce, foul, ranting performance pieces made her the oracle of the American id. Then Senator Jesse Helms’s anti-art witch hunt turned her into the id’s own martyr. More recently she’s stepped back a bit, to paint the id’s portrait. Her 2004 play, George and Martha (later published as an illustrated novel), explored the nation’s hidden oedipal drama by imagining a steamy/sick/tortured/silly affair between President Bush and Martha Stewart....

Martin Puryear at Donald Young Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Confessional, created in the late 90s, exemplifies a recurring motif: large, headlike shapes. More than six feet high and almost four feet wide, Confessional is made of wire mesh covered with tar and includes as its “face” a wooden “door” whose chalk markings reveal the wood’s intended use in building rather than fine art....

Lead Story The Democratic Process Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hey, they weren’t running for husband of the year: David Spellman was sworn in as mayor of Black Hawk, Colorado (population 178), in July, a week after pleading guilty to felony charges for beating his wife with a pistol. And four days before the California primaries in June, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported that Republican Jim Galley, a self-described “pro-traditional family” candidate for Congress, had in the 80s repeatedly defaulted on child-support payments and was for a 17-month period simultaneously married to his first and second wives....

The affecting and lovely musical version of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, created by her ex-husband, Robert Nemiroff, with Charlotte Zaltzberg, Judd Woldin, and Robert Brittan, has rarely been revived since its debut in 1973, despite the Tony it won for best musical in 1974. Charles Newell’s intimate staging for Court restores the piece to its south-side roots. Slow to start, it quietly draws us in with a series of ballads and a couple of rousing gospel numbers as it unfolds the story of the Youngers and their quest for a better life, paid for with a $10,000 life insurance policy....

When his second album, Run Come Save Me, appeared in 2001, Rodney Smith–aka ROOTS MANUVA–seemed like the great hope of British hip-hop, making a crucial move away from the example set by American rappers and toward a style based in dub and dancehall. But before long the frenetic sound of grime (see Dizzee Rascal, Saturday) made Manuva’s leap look like a baby step, and he disappeared from view. Awfully Deep (Big Dada) is his first album since, and judging from the rhymes, the last four years haven’t been easy for him....

The working title of Mario Van Peebles’s Baadasssss! was “How to Get the Man’s Foot Outta Your Ass,” which, though wordier, gives a better idea of its thrust. The film is a dramatized account of how Van Peebles’s father, Melvin, made Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, the 1971 indie flick that showed the world there was an audience for a movie about a black man striking back. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

In these adaptations of the stories in Kurt Vonnegut’s Welcome to the Monkey House, writer-director Lauren Ludwig and the young, low-budget SpringLoaded Theatre Company have succeeded where larger, richer groups–like Steppenwolf–have failed. It turns out that the secret to transferring Vonnegut’s dark, wry wit to the stage is to focus tightly on his words: the nine-member ensemble calmly and skillfully releases the comedy in every sly quip, pointed observation, and irony-laden description without ever lunging for the punch line or hammering home a political message....

Second City producer Kelly Leonard has a theory about talk radio. He thinks there’s a relationship between what Second City teaches and what professional gabbers like Steve Dahl and Howard Stern do on the air for three or four hours at a stretch. “Second City builds personalities; radio is a personality medium,” Leonard says. Eureka: Second City Radio. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Leonard, who’s been steeped in radio since childhood (his dad was WGN fixture Roy Leonard), mentioned his idea to WCKG station manager Jeff Schwartz, who wanted to give it a try....

Friday15 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » SERENA-MANEESH The 2005 self-titled debut full-length from this Norwegian band, released in the U.S. last May on PlayLouder/Beggars Banquet, was a transatlantic production–parts of the album were recorded in Boston and in Chicago at Electrical Audio, and Daniel Smith and Sufjan Stevens make cameo appearances. Their sound is a familiar but evergreen web of dreamy pop and twitching noise, with organ, violin, and female vocals drifting over the drones like clouds across a dark red moon....