Last we heard from Neil Rosario and Mark Henning, the core duo behind this rarely convened local group, they were neck-deep in 70s soul, but on the new Kings & Queens (Thrill Jockey) they trawl through early 80s R & B and electronics-kissed funk. Much of the album was coproduced with Abel Garibaldi, who’s recorded the likes of R. Kelly, Ciara, and Britney Spears; the popular local street brass band Hypnotic lays down charts as tight and plush as anything from Earth, Wind & Fire; bass duties alternate between band vet Doug Demers and soul and blues session pro Charles “Chuck-a-Luck” Hosch....

We love the atmosphere here. It’s very dark and sensual, but we always have to be careful not to get too carried away because of what happened at a friend’s wedding. As the night progressed everyone was drinking and people were getting into the mood, and my wife decided that we should go off and sneak in a quickie. In hindsight, the floor underneath the desk in the lobby probably wasn’t the best place to go, but we’d had a lot of champagne–we imagined that we were completely hidden....

The four-week fest wraps up with programs at Iron Studios, 3636 S. Iron, and other venues. Performance and video tickets cost $8 each, $5 for students. Performances are streamed live at the festival Web site. For details see selectmediafestival.org 6-9 PM, 3100 and 3200 blocks of South Morgan: Quimby’s, Myopic Books, and Odd Obsession Video set up temporary outposts, alongside Bridgeport Coffee House and Kaplan’s Liquors, already in the zone. An Introduction to Chicago’s Secret Underground Cave System That No One Knew About 8 PM at Iron Studios: a play by Dillon De Give, followed by music from J+J+J (10 PM), Beau Wanzer (11 PM), and Herc and Friends (midnight)....

James Horan and Matthew O’Malley, the well-connected proprietors of the Park Grill restaurant in Millennium Park, got a sweet deal. In 2003 they signed a 30-year contract with the Park District that allowed them to pay relatively little for the right to operate a restaurant, a souvenir shop, a bakery, and several kiosks and concession carts in the park. The deal was so sweet it drew lots of attention from the media–and from the county tax assessor....

The Right to a Write-Off Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Citrin, who studied at the University of Illinois, the School of the Art Institute, and the American Academy of Art, says she made this kind of work for three or four years before moving on. “They were audacious for the time,” she says, “and they got noticed.” One was included in the Art Institute’s 1973 “Chicago and Vicinity” show; another–a checkerboard lid raised to expose a set of teeth about to chomp on a penis–helped shut down a Florida gallery....

James Davis “Did growing up in the 1960s leave a permanent effect on attitudes and values?” James Davis asked last year in Public Opinion Quarterly, drawing on a body of research that dates back to the 70s. The answer, he found, is yes–but not to the degree that aging boomers might think. JD: That’s the most important question this kind of social survey faces. Not many of the questions we ask can be checked objectively, either because it would cost too much or because there is no way to check the answer to “How happy are you?...

This festival of work by black artists from around the world continues Friday, August 10, through Thursday, August 30, at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State. Unless otherwise noted, tickets are $9, $5 for Film Center members; for more information call 312-846-2800. Following is the schedule for August 10 through 16; a complete festival schedule is available online at www.chicagoreader.com. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Fassytails Director Roxxy Cooley adapted her own stage play for this video about generations of a Chicago family plagued by unwanted teen pregnancies....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Two of Brazil’s most original new(er) artists played over the weekend as part of the World Music Festival, and both of them proved they can make use of just about any musical approach. On Saturday Cibelle, a Sao Paulo native who now lives in London, played an intimate set at the HotHouse, meticulously assembling a bricolage of tiny electronic samples and manipulations, along with subtle guitar patterns, to create delicate pop songs that sound like they’re perpetually about to disintegrate....

Hi editors, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’d like to ask Michael Miner if it isn’t just good journalistic practice to gather all the evidence you can and let it fall together into the picture that it seems determined to make [Hot Type, October 20]. I haven’t read David Ray Griffin’s book on 9/11 or the interview that Mr. Miner refers to in Conscious Choice....

Yet another band to generate a big buzz with little actual product, the Portland powerhouse DANAVA has so far made one comp appearance and released a couple demo tracks, but the tunes sound like the work of musicians with a future longer than 15 minutes. Danava’s fresh approach to aggro space rock is flexible enough that it ought to be sustainable more or less indefinitely–they sometimes dress up their long-journeying songs in shameless glam glitter and sometimes tweak them with elegant impishness a la Syd Barrett (RIP), and they always sound like they could’ve survived an intergalactic space battle with Damon Edge with most of their shields intact....

Roughly once a week since September “Olive,” a 25-year-old senior account executive at a downtown PR company, and “Mason,” a 28-year-old management supervisor, have made a bet to determine who will buy the other lunch the following week. On their blog, oliveandmason.com, they’ve provided details of each bet and, as a sort of bonus, reviews of the restaurants. They say they’re pretty sure their relationship hasn’t violated any company policy, but you have to wonder what their boss would think....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Because the future of journalism is so unclear, the curriculum changes at the Medill School of Journalism can’t easily be criticized on the grounds that they’re not preparing students to function in it. Who knows? So the case against rampaging dean John Lavine, who took over Medill almost two years ago after running Northwestern’s Media Management Center, is anchored by the charge that he’s left his faculty out of the process....

The Cryptogram It reportedly took Mamet 15 years to finish the semiautobiographical script, which depicts the relentless, irreversible abandonment of a ten-year-old boy, John, by his errant father and traumatized mother. A tense, manicured howl of a play, The Cryptogram is set in a suburban Chicago living room in 1959, the year Mamet was 11. As it opens John can’t sleep–a problem he faces in all three of the play’s extended scenes, the second of them a night later and the last a month after that–perhaps because he’s so excited about the camping trip he’s supposed to be going on with his father, Robert, the next day....

New Music Chicago is bringing together 17 of the city’s new-music ensembles for this unprecedented two-day festival of contemporary music at the Museum of Contemporary Art. The opening concert will start with an introduction by Mark-Anthony Turnage, one of two new composers in residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, followed by performances of Paul Oehlers’s Juggernaut for solo cello, Kirsten Broberg’s Increscence for violin and piano, and the world premiere of George Flynn’s virtuosic and at times jazzy Flamboyance for flute and piano....

A bitter old history teacher at a wild English high school (Judi Dench) befriends an attractive young colleague who’s just arrived (Cate Blanchett), only to discover she’s having sex with a 15-year-old student. The skillful Patrick Marber (Closer) adapted this gripping drama from a novel by Zoe Heller, and it’s both literate and urgently plotted, with a voice-over from Dench that cuts like broken glass. Her character is sly, controlling, desperately lonely, and capable of anything, and when Blanchett’s secret gets out, a proper chamber drama explodes into something much more troubling....

Kudos to Ben Joravsky for his relentless reporting on TIF spending. With Daley’s iron grip and his loyal band of alderpeople, he will continue to ride roughshod over what appears to be a very complacent Chicago populace. His wholehearted approval of Alderman Cardenas’s proposed tax on bottled water [blog post by Mick Dumke at Clout City, chicagoreader.com] in the city is a slap in the face of every Chicago citizen and a below-the-belt sucker punch to unsuspecting tourists who will pay the price....

My boyfriend and I have been together for a little over four years. I love him more than I thought possible. A few weeks ago I met a guy that I think is amazingly shiny–and I slept with him. My boyfriend encouraged me to enjoy myself, so I did. But now it’s eating at him. He makes little needling comments about my leaving him for the new lover. I’ve tried to reassure him that I love him and want to share my life with him, but it hasn’t seemed to help....

Pit Er Pat | Pyramids (Thrill Jockey) Pit Er Pat | Pyramids Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The band has suggested that the recurrence of pyramid imagery in their lives–in the art they make, in their “personal encounters,” even in their three-piece lineup–inspired the album. But dreams seem to play an equally important role. The opening track, “Brain Monster,” is an off-kilter lullaby with a sparse keyboard melody that sounds like an amplified music box, and Davis-Jeffers’s crystalline, casually elegiac vocals call up the ambiguous underworld of the unconscious: “So scared to go to sleep, afraid of what I might dream,” she murmurs, as electronic glitches flitter in the background....

“The museum was always lorded over you as an inner-city kid, especially if you’re from a public school in Baltimore,” says Hamza Walker, associate curator and director of education at the Renaissance Society. Looking at objects from distant cultures as a child, he says, he’d often find himself wondering what to think. “What am I supposed to learn from this goddamn spoon, or this marble bust, or this Brueghel painting? What is it trying to say?...

Roberto Rossellini’s buoyant masterpiece (1950, 83 min.) is a glorious hallucination of perfect harmony between man and nature. The Franciscans arrive at Assisi in the first reel and leave in the last. In between, as they say, nothing happens and everything happens. Rossellini is able to suggest the scope and rhythm of an entire lost way of life through a gradual accumulation of well-observed detail. The Franciscans are at once inspired and slightly foolish, but Rossellini maintains a profound respect for the grandeur of their delusions....