Tactical Works is a small group of friends spread out across Baltimore, North Carolina, and Tennessee that includes architects, electrical engineers, machinists, and luthiers. They play in five so-called Brut bands: Beton Brut, New Brutalism, Villabrut, Soldat Brut, and a fifth that’s so far unnamed. Everyone involved shares a love of Brutalist architecture (think poured concrete and severe geometry, like the Regenstein Library at the U. of C.), angular, pared-down rock (think Shellac), and aluminum....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A harsh winter has reduced Colombia’s exports of the hormiga culona, or big-butt queen ant, prompting a spike in prices for chocolate-dipped ants in London and ant-based sauces and spreads at home, according to an Associated Press dispatch in August. And a July Reuters story calls New York’s Explorers Club virtually the only place where gourmands can enjoy such delicacies as scorpion, cricket, tarantula, and maggot, as well as the eyeballs and testicles of livestock....

I’ve got a lot of those dancing-on-the-bar stories–who doesn’t?–but that’s probably why my evening here was so memorable. My friend Sarah and I wanted to go out but didn’t want to go to the typical smoky bar. Sarah had heard of this place and we decided to give it a try. They have shelves and shelves full of board games–everything from Candyland and Chutes and Ladders to Trivial Pursuit and Scrabble....

Thomas Gibbons’s engrossing play, based on a true story, looks at how a battle between art-world conservatism and innovation gets fought when the go-getter, an ambitious new museum director, is black. At the center of this first-rate production from director Lisa Portes and her cast is the struggle to distinguish covert racism from simple reluctance to change–and the larger issue of whether the difference matters. Former Chicago actor Harry J. Lennix, now best known for such films as The Human Stain and Ray, gives the new-broom character such authority that Gibbons’s failure to penetrate the thicket of the man’s motives almost doesn’t matter....

[snip] If you think horoscopes are bunk, you don’t have to call yourself a “non-astrologer,” writes Sam Harris on the blog the Huffington Post. “Likewise, ‘atheism’ is a term that should not even exist. Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make when in the presence of religious dogma.” –Harold Henderson | hhenderson@chicagoreader.com Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » [snip] “Neither the Ten Commandments nor the teachings of Jesus seem to command any more practical adherence in America than in Europe,” writes Australian commentator John Quiggin on the blog Crooked Timber, even though many more Americans than Europeans profess to be religious....

It’s a little odd to create such a heavily digitized critical look at the digital age, especially when what draws you in isn’t the technology: what works best in this collaboration between the Builders Association, a performance group, and dbox, a multimedia studio, is its human aspect. Of the three story lines, delivered in interwoven vignettes featuring live and projected performances, two have genuine dramatic interest. In one, a Ugandan businessman has successive encounters with U....

When Gospel Was Gospel (Shanachie) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When Gospel Was Gospel, a recently released compilation, does nothing to explain the genre’s unpopularity. The disc–a stellar anthology of tracks from 1945 to 1960, which compiler Anthony Heilbut dubs gospel’s “golden age”–is thoroughly accessible to anyone who listens to roots music with any regularity. Rosetta Tharpe’s jazzy acoustic guitar on “Little Boy, How Old Are You” would do Lonnie Johnson proud; R....

In 1922, if you were missing a limb or had a disability that people gawked at, you risked a $50 fine if you ventured onto the streets of Chicago. The intent of the ordinance that restricted such movement was evident in its wording: the city wanted to shield the public from those who were “in any way deformed so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object.” The ordinance–which the City Council didn’t repeal until 1974–is now on display at the National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum, amid other documents, art, and artifacts that tell the at times shameful, at times inspiring history of disability in Chicago: from mid-19th-century institutionalization and relocation efforts to the early-20th-century eugenics initiatives to modern disability rights movements that demanded accessible public transportation and housing and paved the path for activist groups such as Not Dead Yet, which opposes legalized euthanasia and assisted suicide, and Jerry’s Orphans, which annually protests Jerry Lewis’s televised pity parties....

What do Takeshi Kitano’s Zatoichi and Michael Mann’s Collateral, both opening this week, have in common? Judging by what some of my colleagues have been saying, they’re both effective action movies directed by talented genre specialists. But I would argue that this description applies only to Collateral. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mann, by contrast, betrays no such alienation from genre conventions. Collateral is a film that could have been made 50 years ago; it’s not hard to imagine a taut little black-and-white version of the story, which concerns a cabdriver named Max (Jamie Foxx) who’s forced at gunpoint to chauffeur a contract killer called Vincent (Tom Cruise) around Los Angeles as he tries to bump off five grand jury witnesses about to testify against a cartel of drug traffickers....

The eclectic Nashville roots rocker Bobby Bare Jr. took care to make his fine new album, The Longest Meow (Bloodshot), sound as unpolished as possible. He and a ragtag bunch of players (moonlighting from bands like My Morning Jacket, Lambchop, Clem Snide, and …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead) worked up the material over a few weeks, then banged out the recordings in about 11 hours. It’s a winning approach: the arrangements are packed with detail–the honking saxophone commentary on “The Heart Bionic,” the weedy harmony vocals on “Gun Show”–but never lose their endearingly scruffy feel....

When I was a child I read Cheaper by the Dozen the way I read all my favorite books: often. Fifty or sixty times, at least: fast, slow, word by word, huge sloppy gulps, bits and pieces, the whole thing. I abandoned it after college, but the dog-eared paperback eventually crept back into my hands, bringing with it in adult rereadings a familiar, unanswered confusion. First published in 1948 and still in print, Cheaper By the Dozen is the true story of motion study experts and industrial management pioneers Frank Bunker Gilbreth (1868-1924) and Lillian Moller Gilbreth (1878-1972) and their family of 12 children, six girls and six boys....

Singer and multi-instrumentalist Christina Carter is best known for the often emotionally harrowing music she plays in Charalambides, but her recent releases without the band sound every bit as haunted. Meditations on the Ascension of Blind Joe Death, Vol. 1 (Ecstatic Yod), recorded with guitarist Loren MazzaCane Connors, is a tribute to John Fahey, but they don’t attempt to mimic his lustrous acoustic fingerpicking. Connors’s electric leads are so stark and monolithic they could have been carved from stone; Carter’s sparse piano notes drizzle over them like cold rain on a grave....

Reentry problems. “The most established job-placement agency for ex-offenders in the state, the Safer Foundation, places only about one-third of the more than 4,500 ex-offenders it serves each year, said Kathy Woods, the organization’s associate vice president for workforce strategies,” writes Sarah Karp in the Chicago Reporter (November). “Of those who get jobs, a third of them get fired or quit within 30 days.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Writer-performer Steven Fales has an extraordinary story to tell. Born gay and Mormon, he married, had kids, and underwent “reparative therapy” in an effort to go straight. Finally he gave up, suffered through divorce and excommunication, and descended into a vortex of drug addiction and self-destruction as a sex worker in New York City. But despite this potent material, the first half of Fales’s autobiographical monologue lacks personalizing detail and well-rounded characters; Mormonism is presented as little beyond antiseptic smiles and intolerance, and his Mormon therapist is just shy of the Church Lady....

As part of a U.S. government cultural-exchange program, Chicago saxophonist Ernest Dawkins traveled to South Africa and Mozambique in 1997 to play with jazz musicians there. Not that you’d know it from listening to subsequent recordings by Dawkins’s New Horizons Ensemble. Though the new The Messenger: Live at the Original Velvet Lounge (Delmark; also on DVD) captures the outfit at its bluesy, brawny best–the freedom-seeking impulses of the AACM propel a program of hard-bop originals into a churchy, funky ecstasy, and the front line of Dawkins, trumpeter Maurice Brown, and trombonist Steve Berry uncork one crackerjack solo after another, stoked by a ferocious rhythm section–it’s hard to hear the influence of African jazz on the music....

It’s almost always bad luck to say this about a label, but I’ve never heard a record on Southern Lord I didn’t like. Though I haven’t heard them all yet, I’ve heard enough to know that my odds of getting serious, satisfying, innovative metal are way better than even. The label was founded by Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson, both of Sunn O))) and Thorr’s Hammer, who’ve further confirmed their good taste by adding Chicago’s own Lair of the Minotaur to their roster....

JAY BENNETT Which Side Are You On? | Sloboda Recordings Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On its debut album, released last fall, this quartet flits from southern jangle pop to alt-country to emo without settling neatly into any particular niche. But despite all that wandering, the disc is a better-than-average set: front man Matt Stern has a rubbery vocal delivery that suggests a huskier Michael Stipe, and he’s backed by a dynamic and sympathetic group of musicians, anchored by bassist-keyboardist-vocalist Shayla Thiel....

One distinguishing mark of San Francisco’s bustling Asian-American jazz community is its commitment to the use of non-Western instruments as tools for improvisation, and few figures on the scene are more exciting than Miya Masaoka, who plays jazz on the brittle-sounding Japanese zither known as the koto. Her training is in traditional Japanese music, but her improvising sounds at once carefully considered and effortlessly agile. On the 1997 trio recording Monk’s Japanese Folk Song (Dizim, 1997) she again and again finds ingenious ways to convey Thelonious Monk’s jagged lyricism using her twangy, unwieldy ax, and for a series of improvised duets with trombonist George Lewis on 1998’s The Usual Turmoil (Music & Arts), she coaxes all manner of unconventional sounds out of the instrument: discordant bowed double-stops, open-ended bass lines, and sheer clanky noise....

Over a few weeks in the fall of 2001 a bunch of randy, lonesome lechers up late at night on a Yahoo masturbation chat room got lucky with a sex-crazed piece of jailbait calling herself Kathy McGinty. Her photograph showed a young blond with a smoldering gaze curled up barefoot on an unmade bed and wearing a school uniform that revealed the slightest peek of white panties. She had no trouble finding guys to chat with, and occasionally she’d invite them to call a phone number with a Chicago area code....

CONTINUED FROM LAST WEEK . . . So our apartment was in flames, I was out on the front lawn and had recognized a neighbor from here where I work, and I was in a state of hysteria because our two cats were still inside. My boyfriend Brett showed up, and though the place was still smoldering they let him go in. He found Ronin under the couch in the living room, wet up to his knees but OK....