This time it’s come down to a pack of cigarettes. He puts his hand between the sofa cushions where the more vulnerable packs sometimes get captured. Grit but no cigarettes. He scans the floor, picturing how this will turn out. Silence. He takes another step. I’mo go git another pack. More silence. You want me to bring you somethin’ back? There’s another city. Bigger. Seven hours past the first city. No one from here goes there....

Like a lot of people, I first heard Gothenburg’s Love Is All via “Felt Tip,” a raggedly seductive indie-pop tune in a Liliput or Slits mood, with sweetly melodic girl vocals and spoken boy backgrounds driving it from furtive to full-on. It was posted last year on Fluxblog, Matthew Perpetua’s eclectic, well-respected MP3 blog, and I wound up tracing the song to a now defunct Swedish label, Smashing Time, which had put out the seven-inch....

Disgusted by the months-long Soviet-style engineering that put Todd Stroger on the November ballot for Cook County Board president, I was fully prepared to vote for his Republican opponent, Tony Peraica, in protest. That is, until I read the article that shed a little more light on the candidate [The Works, August 4]. Despite Peraica’s claims that he’s no homophobe but rather a live-and-let-live kind of guy, he likened gay visibility and full participation in society to the “decay from within” that caused the decline of all great empires....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “All across the country, proprietors, landlords and residents associations are privately, voluntarily implementing smoking bans,” says the Cato Institute’s Tom Firey (surely no pun intended). “Because those actions are voluntary and private, market forces will lead to the provision of establishments and housing for both nonsmokers and smokers. This is fitting in a free society that values choice and respects the individual....

In the early 20th century “Madam” C.J. Walker, born Sarah Breedlove, worked her way up from washerwoman to millionaire, courtesy of the line of hair-care products she developed for her fellow black women. Too bad that in this hagiographic melodrama, writer-director Regina Taylor reduces the fascinating Walker to an African-American Mildred Pierce. Taylor’s parade of (offstage) historical names can’t raise the script above the level of a generic tale about a plucky woman who succeeds in business but struggles with relationships, particularly with her headstrong party-girl daughter....

Milton Frederick Marcus’s 1998 play is an egregious example of the American tendency to see every event in terms of personal melodrama: he uses the Holocaust only as grisly backdrop to a fictional affair between the wife of Hitler’s deputy fuhrer and her gardener, a Jewish botanist taken from a concentration camp. (You know how it goes: boy meets girl, girl calls boy a “hook-nosed degenerate,” boy and girl fall into each other’s arms over shared confidences, French wine, and Wagner records....

Nicholas Wright’s lively if unsubstantiated recounting of Vincent van Gogh’s sexual awakening in London at least aims for historical verisimilitude. The dank kitchen setting and pivotal thunderstorm seem allusions to Wuthering Heights, and references to Dickens and George Eliot abound in his literate script. But suspension of disbelief is a must given the torrid affair Wright posits between van Gogh and his boardinghouse proprietor. The sexual mores here are more in keeping with a Harlequin romance than a Victorian novel; still, kudos to Wright for portraying a May-December relationship that isn’t rooted in oedipal perversion....

The tricky thing for any group like the Warsaw Village Band, who exclusively perform old Polish folk music, is it’s very easy to come off sounding quaint. But on its latest album, Uprooting (World Village), the sextet continues to pull off its song-preservation mission in style. Concentrating specifically on tunes from the Mazovia province, which were nearly obliterated by communism’s antiregional imperatives, the band strikes a balance between the traditional and the contemporary, playing with a dynamic urgency that bears no trace of mustiness....

Werner Moebius uses the plasticity of sound to set up dialogues with other media, other music methodologies, and even other species. The Austrian-born sound artist has worked extensively with dancers and video artists, and during a residency last summer at the Boreas Farm, a dance center in Hebron, New York, he created an outdoor installation for the local wildlife called Music for the Coyotes. Hopefully he’ll put it on a record someday–with its masterful balance of elongated feedback filaments and echoing reports, it’s way too good to be heard only by varmints....

friday27 cgang gang dance The sky’s always yellow around Gang Gang Dance–even when their vaguely mystical music veers dangerously close to hippie drum-circle nonsense, violence is brewing close at hand. The New York quartet’s latest album, last year’s Hillulah (Social Registry), could be the sound track to a momentous and dreadful trek, maybe to meet a holy recluse or get crucified. Liz Bougatsos processes her wounded, wondering vocals with distortion, turning them into a sort of exhausted, delirious sickbed wail....

This English band, formed in 1977, plays raise-your-pint-glass pub punk in outfits straight out of A Clockwork Orange. But though the catchy, brilliantly boneheaded tunes are plenty aggressive, they’re much more likely to inspire a drunken sing-along than a bit of the old ultraviolence. By the early 80s the Adicts were so sick of the leather-jacket-and-Mohawk uniform that they switched to black bowlers and droogie white–except for their hyperactive singer, Monkey, who adopted scary Joker-style greasepaint and dressed like a refugee from a French circus....

To understand politics in Chicago, you start with one basic fact–there’s one all-powerful mayor and 50 very wimpy aldermen. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Daley lets the aldermen control the little stuff in their wards, while he directs the big stuff–budgets, patronage, promotions, construction projects, and housing and education policy. The mayor’s control of the big stuff has been responsible, in recent years, for the hideous rehab of Soldier Field, the construction of the vastly overbudget Millennium Park, the destruction of a municipal airport under cover of darkness, the continued rise in property taxes, the overpriced and much delayed Brown Line reconstruction (which is causing long delays on the Red Line), and the Pink Line addition coming at the expense of other services on the west side, as well as sweeping education and public housing policy changes that allowed Daley appointees to hold thousands of kids back or kick thousands of families out of their homes....

On January 4, Chicago Transit Authority president Frank Kruesi called a press conference to announce that the CTA had decided to reject Citgo’s offer of a discount on fuel for its buses. Kruesi said the $15 million proposal was doomed because Citgo was offering the wrong kind of fuel. “If we accepted this proposal, we would not be able to run reliable transit service,” Kruesi told reporters. “Our buses would be stranded all over the region, and we would be doubling our emissions in the buses that use it....

Two young Asian men, standing behind a desk protecting so much audio equipment it looked like a movie set of a NASA control room, pointed me toward a labyrinth of smoky glass adorned with the occasional large-scale photo of a scary clown or an endless field of flowers. I passed a cooler full of Heinekens and Gatorade and bottled Frappuccinos, then found my destination: a room sponge-painted forest green and upholstered in grandma floral fabric, with mirrors everywhere....

Hip Fit Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jennifer Rozenberg is obsessed with jeans: at any one time she’s got about 20 pairs in her closet. “I don’t like to go places I can’t wear them,” she says. But with new pairs often costing upward of a hundred bucks, even maintaining such a casual wardrobe can get awfully expensive. That’s why in October Rozenberg opened Hip Fit, a shop on West Foster in Andersonville specializing in affordable secondhand jeans....

“There’s more to this grim, ambitious movie than a psychopathic assassin of the highest order whose carnage is gorgeously shot, though I seriously doubt it would be garnering so much enthusiasm without such perks.” —Jonathan Rosenbaum, November 8 Miner was OK in his reference to Norma Zilk but was a bit off regarding Lake View’s supposed “world-class women’s track program.” He and the readers should know that in the 1920s, because of the noncompetitive ideology of physical educators of the day regarding women’s athletics, the Chicago Board of Education did not allow interscholastic track teams for girls....

Jo March is a brat in Allan Knee, Jason Howland, and Mindi Dickstein’s musical based on Louisa May Alcott’s novel. But in this touring version of the Broadway show, Kate Fisher’s arresting physicality and supple voice render the potentially irritating protagonist charismatic–especially in the first act’s closing number, “Astonishing,” when she embodies ambition without context or direction. The book can be dutiful, but the songs have a satisfying unity, constantly returning to the theme of change, which the adventurous Jo somehow has trouble negotiating....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Chicago connection: The parents of Butler University student Sheridan ‘Danny’ Dahlquist, a sophomore who was killed after four other students accidentally started a fire during a botched fireworks prank in Dahlquist’s bedroom, grew up in the Chicago area. To wit: Dahlquist’s father, Craig, was raised in Arlington Heights, and his mother, Patricia (nee Carew), is from Wilmette. Both of Dahlquist’s parents work at Butler University and live not far from where the accident occurred....

I’m hoping that at my new gig here I never have the same kind of night that I had when I was working a steady at the Pump Room. I came home from my day job, took a quick nap, and missed my alarm. I got dressed and jumped into the car to head to my gig but ran out of gas near the Independence exit off the Eisenhower. I used my cell phone to call my mother to come pick me up, but as soon as she said “Hello” the phone died....

Multi-instrumentalist Jim O’Rourke left Sonic Youth after 2004’s Sonic Nurse, and because the stripped-back, streamlined performances on the band’s latest, Rather Ripped (Geffen), have a liberated eagerness that’s at odds with his penchant for elaborate arrangements and just-so studio treatments, it’s tempting to attribute the album’s sound to his departure. But even a half-awake listen to Sonic Nurse makes it clear the band was already headed this way, and in a recent Wire interview singer-guitarist Thurston Moore suggested a more credible reason for the current direction: his immersion in the international free-improv underground gives him so many other places to make noise that he doesn’t need to bring any to Sonic Youth....