All Talk Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » WBEW, the Chesterton outpost acquired by CPR over three years ago, is about to get a wattage boost that’ll expand its broadcast to nearly the entire Chicago area. The station is now being envisioned as a “multimedia service” intended to snare a younger and more diverse audience. Malatia says WBEZ will continue to do interviews with local musicians on shows like Eight Forty-Eight, and WBEW will frequently play full cuts as segments within its public affairs-and-culture format, but neither will offer a “consistent stream of music, no place where you can go and hear music for a half hour at a stretch....

Composer Osvaldo Golijov, who was born in 1960 in Argentina, fuses the klezmer and Hebraic music of the home he grew up in, Piazzolla’s tangos, and myriad other musical traditions. The results are original, organic, impossible to label, and immensely compelling. His one-act opera Ainadamar, or “Fountain of Tears,” is set in 1936 in the place where Spanish poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca was murdered at the start of the Spanish civil war, and the main character is Margarita Xirgu, an actress who collaborated on several of Garcia Lorca’s plays and is haunted by the thought that she might have saved him....

On a recent weekday evening, three cars pulled into the parking lot of Big Poppa’s Chicken and Ribs in Harvey and nine men–some carrying notebooks and digital cameras–crowded in to place their order: a slab of spareribs, rib tips, and hot links, sauce on the side. The food was unpacked and arranged on a counter, but a stout man forbade the others to touch it until he’d taken its picture. Then the group began its work....

The closest thing to the Black Lips‘ hyper-jangly “flower punk” is early Rolling Stones. But it took the Stones playing Altamont for their live reputation to live up to the dangerous image they projected, while the Lips have been a menace from the start. The willingness of the band’s members to cut themselves, piss in each others’ mouths, and basically be a hazard to any people or inanimate objects around them in the name of entertainment has earned them a deservedly rabid following–like if G....

DFA DJ TOUR I spent one of the worst nights I’ve ever had in a club waiting for James Murphy and Tim Goldsworthy, aka the DFA, to DJ. It was about five years ago in some posh wine bar on the Lower East Side with no ins and outs, and for four hours people bailed on me one by one until my best friend and I were sitting alone in silence....

JUNE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If you attend a performance of The Mystery of Edwin Drood at Circle Theatre tonight or tomorrow you’ll get free admission to “Off the Page 4,” a champagne brunch and discussion with the play’s creator, Rupert Holmes (of pina-colada song fame), on Sunday, June 13. Holmes won Tony awards for best book and best score after the interactive mystery opened on Broadway in 1985 (it also won the Tony for best musical that season); his more recent work includes Say Goodnight, Gracie....

The United States of Leland A few years back some disability-rights activists were offended by the movie There’s Something About Mary. I wholeheartedly disagreed. Sure, the Farrelly brothers threw in scenes that showed people with disabilities as clumsy and bossy, but it was all funny and close to the truth. I would have been more offended had the Farrelly brothers left us out. They satirize everything and everyone else. Why not us?...

This 1959 musical about New York’s colorful Depression-era mayor is a seldom performed gem: it holds up remarkably well thanks to Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick’s ear-pleasing tunes and to Jerome Weidman and George Abbott’s well-structured, unsentimental book. The show charts Fiorello LaGuardia’s career from young do-gooder lawyer to his election as the mayor who finally broke the back of Tammany Hall. Director Nick Bowling has filled TimeLine’s intimate stage with ingenious stage pictures–raised picket signs act as a screen for video clips, for example....

Lynn Becker’s September 14 article on the debate over Grant Park as a site for the relocated Chicago Children’s Museum [“Forever Open, Clear, and Free”] is a compelling exposition of why the museum’s proposal to relocate into the northeast corner of the park is flawed and inappropriate. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Many other parks in large American cities, such as Central Park in New York or Forest Park in St....

Grizzly Adams look-alike Sam Beam has come a long way from the naked austerity of his early stuff. With IRON & WINE’s 2005 EP, Woman King, he proved he could write hooks that’d give you goose bumps–as well as make eerie jug-band rock that’s actually danceable, at least in a muddy-hippie way. Now he’s leading an eclectic, porchy ensemble that calls to mind the rural roots of the jam-band movement–a lot of their set at Pitchfork had me thinking, “Wow, there really was a lot to love about the Grateful Dead....

For more than two years this quartet has held down a Tuesday-night residency at Hotti Biscotti, improvising without a net, and their brand-new debut, Extraordinary Popular Delusions (Okka Disk), is a ferocious, fully committed set that careens from scalding free blowing to abstract rumination. Though it was recorded just after their regular gig began, they display a preternatural level of interconnection–keyboardist Jim Baker, drummer Steve Hunt, bassist-guitarist Brian Sandstrom, and reedist Mars Williams were hardly strangers at that session, having worked together in steady groups like the NRG Ensemble and Caffeine as well as countless ad hoc ensembles....

One of the sharpest moments in this smart sketch-comedy revue, directed by David Pompeii for Second City Outreach and Diversity, is a rap performance peppered with the names of products like Depends and chains like Home Depot–a pointed slap at artists who trade their creativity for corporate branding. Actually most of this politically oriented show is pointed: though many of the sketches are only lightly funny, they all make provocative, interesting points about race, class, and morality in America....

In an interview last year with the Web zine Perfect Sound Forever, Chicago composer and cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm characterized himself as a “basic research kind of guy”–he’s as excited by the process of working with musicians as he is by the results. That philosophy is especially evident in his Lightbox Orchestra, where he conducts mostly ad hoc groups of improvisers with a box of colored lights coded to tell different players when to start or stop....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Rybczynski’s making what I take to be a fairly conservative point, since he’s riffing on a forthcoming book, The Architecture of the Absurd: How “Genius” Disfigured a Practical Art, written by cranky former Boston University president John Silber and praised by (shudder) George Will. But it’s also a point often made by those of us who wish architects paid more attention to the people who have to live and work in their creations....

Paul Feig saw some of the most painful moments of his youth re-created on the small screen in Freaks and Geeks, the TV series he and Judd Apatow made for NBC about dorks and burnouts suffering through high school in 1980. In 2000, in the middle of its critically acclaimed but poorly rated first season, the show was canceled, though its cult has increased since the release of a DVD box set last year....

Pan Sonic has spent more than a decade reducing techno to its barest form, an austere landscape erupting with gut-rumbling beats and lacerating tones. On most of their early records Mika Vainio and Ilpo Vaisanen hijacked the bass-heavy thuds of old-school electro and the low-rent electronic squall of Suicide (even collaborating with Alan Vega on a pair of albums under the name VVV) and drove them deep into the red. But on their last release, 2004’s sprawling four-CD Kesto (Blast First/Mute), the duo largely strayed from dance structures and focused instead on creating a harrowing, amorphous sound world....

After wowing audiences with a self-titled show last year at Steppenwolf, Shenoah Allen and Marc Chavez–aka the Pajama Men–return with a sketch revue that reprises their improvisational feel and many of their winning, quirky characters. This show’s not really about anything either, but again they create a surreal world of situations and creatures and toy with transitions out of roles and scenes. The second time around, their physical humor and wordplay are still clever but occasionally border on cutesy, and their many tangents off setups can induce some “OK, OK” impatience....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As a child Insuaste envisioned her parents’ native Ecuador as a magical place. Her mom talked about seeing a troll while pregnant, and her grandmother reportedly saw her grandfather fighting a shadow. The snowcapped mountains of her parents’ province, Chimborazo, awed her on a first visit there when she was six. Later, while majoring in anthropology and art at Dartmouth, she made trips to Ecuador that combined study and activism, witnessing the political turmoil there....

There was a time when the location of Nick & George’s Restaurant, at the intersection of State Street and State Line Road in Hammond, Indiana, was a prime site for a diner. It was minutes away from the town’s bustling center, which guaranteed a brisk daytime trade. Nighttime business was even better, because the diner was situated in the middle of the Sin Strip, a gauntlet of nightclubs, burlesque joints, and bars that Life magazine once called “the Barbary Coast of the Midwest....

More than any I can recall, this year’s Chicago Jazz Festival is a mixed bag. The Jazz Institute of Chicago, which programs the festival, still has a soft spot for tributes to international stars and local treasures (dead or alive), but that’s about the only thread running through the bookings. The fest’s diversity has always been one of its greatest strengths, but this time it seems more diffuse than diverse–and it doesn’t help that the quality of the artists is uneven as usual....