The Mauritanian singer Malouma Mint Moktar Ould Meidah grew up in a family of griots and began taking music lessons at six, learning how to play the ardin, a kora-like harp; by the time she was fifteen other musicians were performing her original compositions. To allow her to broaden her musical knowledge, her father moved the family to Nouakchott, the nation’s capital, and there she absorbed a wide range of Arabic music while also developing a love of Western classical music and the blues....

The bad news is that the glory days of Chicago house are history. There’s no more Shelter, no more warehouse raves, and fewer venues willing to let in under-21s, which has pretty much meant the end of club-kid culture. The good news is that none of this has stopped Chicago from growing a world-class dance-club scene. Pull out Section 3, flip to the “Dance” portion of the music listings, and you’ll find DJs spinning a couple dozen different kinds of music at name-brand clubs, dive bars, and a range of spots between the two....

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant | Trap Door Theatre Info 773-384-0494 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Before Rainer Werner Fassbinder was a filmmaker he expressed his contempt for bourgeois convention onstage, joining Munich’s experimental Action Theater in 1967. According to one contemporary account, its raucous shows featured “random and irrational factors…but also vehemently passionate acting, and a light, nonchalant kind of aggressiveness....

I’m a 22-year-old gay male. I’m thin and traditionally good-looking enough to have done some modeling. So what’s the problem? I like bears–big, hairy men with beards. I live in New York, and this city is full of cute, skinny, boyish guys, but there are some places to meet bears. The thing is, I don’t really fit in, and I’ve been told just that. A lot of bears seem to be primarily into other bears....

THE SWORD | Age of Winters (Kemado) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But this isn’t to suggest that Age of Winters isn’t also overwhelmingly, unironically satisfying. A template is a template because it works, after all, and the Sword are paint-by-numbers artists of the highest order. “Barael’s Blade” is a punishing exercise in guitar gymnastics, a quick kick in the teeth after the album’s dirgelike instrumental opener, “Celestial Crown,” puts you half to sleep....

Several months ago I posed a question concerning the confusing (and potentially misleading) statistics placed on toothpastes, which my paranoid mind attributes to advertising spin and possibly outright lies by toothpaste makers. Wanting to get the most fluoride bang for my buck, I trusted only your answer, because I know firsthand just how expensive it is to maintain (and replace) one’s teeth. I consistently check your column and understand that not all questions are answered, and that some questions are follow-ups on previous material....

Friday 3 C-RAYZ WALZ New Yorker C-Rayz Walz is an off-kilter and explosive rapper with a knack for delivering eccentric punch lines, which pepper his new album, Year of the Beast (Definitive Jux). MTV recently selected Walz to coach an aspiring battle MC for an episode of the reality show Made, and given his harsh disses–“Keep playing the role, get your head bent / ‘Cause you’re so pussy you could get pregnant”–he should be fun to watch....

Friday 29 GOURDS This Austin quintet has positioned itself as a contemporary incarnation of the Band, and indeed its grasp on the full spectrum of American roots rock has grown more assured over time. But the Gourds have also become seemingly less intent on taking themselves seriously. The Gourds have always demonstrated an ironic, shaggy-dog sense of humor, recasting “Gin and Juice” as a rural ode to self-obliteration or retelling “The Three Billygoats Gruff” using members of James Brown’s band as characters....

Friday 23 THE HACKER Grenoble-born DJ and producer the Hacker made his name on the Gigolo Records scene, creating bombastic beats for his longtime collaborator Miss Kittin, but over the last few years he’s started to sway more toward new deutsch, the austere sound that’s poppin’ in post-minimalist-techno Berlin. On his latest mix CD, A.N.D. N.O.W… (Uncivilized World), he exalts throwbacks and classics by the likes of Ellen Allien and Front 242 and shuns organic sounds in favor of synth-addled new wave....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Just opened this week: Smoque, an Old Irving BBQ joint run by five ‘cue fans, chief among them Barry Sorkin, who went back to his roots in the restaurant business after almost a decade as an IT consultant. Why barbecue? “It’s just about my favorite thing in the world–and it doesn’t seem like there’s any other food out there that people get quite so passionate about....

Dad was in town the other weekend, and he wanted to watch the Michigan-Michigan State basketball game. He lives in East Lansing, so he’s a Spartans fan. His wife planned to spend her afternoon at Menopause the Musical, so I figured we should spend ours at a guy kind of place. We went to Cigar King, in Skokie. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » We bought H....

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN s WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY ETHAN AND JOEL COEN WITH TOMMY LEE JONES, JAVIER BARDEM, JOSH BROLIN, WOODY HARRELSON, KELLY MACDONALD, GARRET DILLAHUNT, AND TESS HARPER I was especially bemused by the ready acceptance of Hannibal Lecter’s supernatural powers—his ability to convince a hostile prisoner in an adjoining cell to swallow his own tongue, for instance, or to know precisely when and where to reach Clarice, the movie’s heroine, on the phone....

On one side of Ann Patchett’s (mostly) graceful fifth novel, Run (Harper), is a tangle of children and mothers, black and white, rich and poor. On the other is Bernard Doyle, widowed father and onetime mayor of Boston, doing his best to sort it all out. Unfolding over one 24-hour period during a whiteout, Run starts out full of drama and conflict, as the various players are thrown together by a freak car accident, but quiets down as the snow falls, settling into an almost dreamlike study of the question of nature versus nurture....

On November 13, 1909, the electricity was out in the Saint Paul Coal Company’s mine in Cherry, Illinois, 100 miles southwest of Chicago, so nearly 500 men and boys were working by the light of candles and kerosene lamps. Around 1:30 PM a coal car carrying hay to mules in an underground stable stopped under one of the lamps, and the hay ignited. Some of the workers were able to get out of the mine before the escape shaft burned; others were rescued through the main shaft before the mine was sealed off to extinguish the flames....

Coconut Bras and Little Grass Shacks Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Lee says the problem arose when she was away last year, teaching for a semester at Denison University. Her program had grown and it was time to expand the faculty anyway, so she recommended Mike Hammerman, who’d been a student of hers for six or seven years, to take over the beginning ukulele class....

Director Claude Autant-Lara was one of the principal figures of the French “tradition of quality” that flourished during the Nazi occupation, and this 1943 masterpiece, which also introduced the writing team of Pierre Bost and Jean Aurenche, is the first of several great films he made. The radiant Odette Joyeux stars as the title heroine, a socialite who seeks to flee her lavish but suffocating environs with the handsome family caretaker, only to discover that the relationship is doomed....

We’ve reached the Wilson stop on the Red Line when a skinny young guy gets on and swaggers to his seat. He isn’t dressed funny and he doesn’t smell or talk to himself, but there’s this angry energy in his strut that makes him seem like a troublemaker. We’re all watching him, but furtively, out of the corners of our eyes. Troublemaker, folding his arms: “No way. No way am I turning down my music....

No album I’ve heard this year has confounded me more than God’s Money (The Social Registry), the second album by Gang Gang Dance–and I mean that as high praise. The New York quartet feeds a battery of percussion, woozy synthesizers, and broadly ethnic-sounding female vocals into an early-80s avant-rock aesthetic. They started out using a heavily improvisational approach: their debut, Revival of the Shittest (2003), had a wide-eyed experimental bent that featured scrabbling percussion, loose but sickly grooves, effects-heavy guitar gunk, and warbling voices....

Karl Wirsum Jean Albano 215 W. Superior through October 16 312-440-0770 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Wirsum, 64, was affected strongly by two childhood traumas. When he fractured his skull at five and was hospitalized, his machinist father drew comic strips about elves for him, and Wirsum focused on his own drawings too. That led to Saturday classes at the Art Institute. But when Wirsum was nine, both his parents were killed in a car crash....

The works on this program are “American” in the sense that they’re based on American folk dances. George Balanchine’s Square Dance is annoyingly faux-naif–a caller exhorts ballerinas to “Promenade, pretty girl!”–but intriguingly adds ballet moves and chamber music to a square-dance template. The corps was sharp, though the lead couple made every maneuver look effortful. Antony Tudor’s Dark Elegies, making its Joffrey premiere, creates circle dances and Virginia reels using angular moves a la Martha Graham....