Lurker of Chalice Lurker of Chalice (Southern Lord) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve gotten better at describing that sort of record, but I still have a hard time anticipating where the next one’s coming from. In retrospect I should’ve expected it from Wrest, a one-man black-metal juggernaut from San Francisco who’s been recording as Leviathan since the late 90s. Wrest clearly has a more fertile and restless imagination than most of his peers....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On Friday the concert film Gypsy Caravan, which documents a six-week long package tour of the same name in 2001, opens at the Music Box. The tour featured some of Europe’s most important Romany artists and traveled across North America, though no promoter in Chicago bothered to book it. By bringing together artists from India, Macedonia, Romania, and Spain the Gypsy Caravan tour sought to underline the differences and similarities of the various cultures....

Twyla Tharp’s Baker’s Dozen, which Hubbard Street first performed here in 1991, evokes a lost paradise of generosity and innocence. Created just after Tharp choreographed the 1979 movie version of Hair (and reportedly including some outtakes from that choreography), it’s glancingly tied to the 1920s, when its music, by pianist Willie “the Lion” Smith, was composed. But the 12 dancers’ tumbling in and out of duets, trios, quartets, and sextets creates a sense of a timeless utopian community: though they switch partners constantly, they never lose their goodwill....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “The Plan speaks with surprising directness of the city’s need and right to place limits on speculators and landowners. It does so not only when it states that the lakefront ‘by right belongs to the people,’ but also when it defends the public appropriation of real estate needed to widen streets and to eradicate threats to sanitation and health....

If I’m understanding the numbers right, the Trib is cutting 28 newsroom jobs while creating 13 new online jobs, so a net reduction of 15 journalists from an editorial staff of 540 [Hot Type, December 9]. A 3 percent change? Corporate payrolls fluctuate by more than that every year just by accident–what’s the big deal about this? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s not like any of the specific layoffs will have any effect on the coverage of local, state, or international news....

The House of Bernarda Alba Theater’s unlikely new It Girl is Bernarda Alba, one of the most pitiless, irredeemable characters in world literature. Over the last few years this brutal matriarch, the “heroine” of Federico Garcia Lorca’s harrowing 1936 play, has shown up at the Mark Taper Forum (played by Chita Rivera) and England’s Orange Tree Theatre and in new ballets in Germany and New Zealand. Last spring David Hare’s translation debuted at London’s National Theatre to ecstatic reviews....

The Molemen are to Chicago hip-hop what Eddie Murphy was to The Nutty Professor: they’re everywhere, even when you don’t realize it. Founded in 1991 and still going strong, the crew has played multiple starring and supporting roles both in the local scene and abroad. PNS, Memo, and crew leader Panik (formerly His-Panik) are best known as producers, and have collaborated with the likes of Aesop Rock, Del tha Funkee Homosapien, Slug, and MF Doom; last year PNS demonstrated his beat wizardry on Showcase Production Music, and fellow Moleman Vakill showed off his knack for baroque wordplay on The Darkest Cloud (both released by the crew’s own label)....

Booth number one is where my friends and I always congregate. We’ve been coming here ever since they opened four, five years ago. There’s no TV, dartboard, jukebox, or pool table. There’s just the music that the bartender plays, so you have to sit and talk to people–which we like. A couple of summers ago I was a lighting technician during a tour of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. We played in Wichita, which is not exactly the cultural center of the world–I think that’s where all the people who buy Creed albums live....

The best psychedelic rock has always wiggled around strict classification. Medieval ballads float into stretches of raga and choruses of pure pop–the strangest segues are sanctified by the sense that the players are unified in some acid-pattern glow on a higher plane of weirdness. The music becomes a hard-to-quantify quest with its own dream logic, where all the visuals are hypercolorful and intense. So far everything the New York collective ONEIDA has done has been just the stuff to send you off into that light fantastic....

The anguish of aging runs through James M. Barrie’s seemingly playful dramas. If Peter Pan celebrates eternal youth, his equally bittersweet Quality Street defies time’s ravages to offer the reassurance of a second chance at love. Barrie’s 1901 homage to Jane Austen’s Persuasion is a Napoleonic-era caprice: a seemingly spurned lady wins back a long-lost lover by disguising herself as her niece. Whimsical, precious, and spun entirely from sugar, the plot requires a ton of willing disbelief–all the more so given Rogue Theater Company’s bare-bones 90-minute production, in which Barrie’s stage directions are meant to fill in both scenic and psychological blanks....

Reeling: The 24th Chicago Lesbian & Gay International Film Festival runs Friday, November 4, through Saturday, November 12, at Chicago Filmmakers; Columbia College Ludington Bldg., 1104 S. Wabash; Landmark’s Century Centre; and the Music Box. Tickets are $10, $8 for members of Chicago Filmmakers. A schedule for the current week follows; for a complete schedule visit www.chicagoreader.com. R Night Watch Like Tipping the Velvet, which screened at last year’s festival, this is a BBC drama adapted from a novel by Sarah Waters, who writes historical novels with lesbian characters....

I’m a 24-year-old straight female. I just moved to a new city where I don’t know anyone. So the other night I hung out with a 21-year-old jock from work. We went to a bar and eventually wound up back at his apartment, where we both smoked pot. I was thinking he was a muscle-bound meathead, so to shock him I told him a story about one of my male friends wearing a skirt....

Like many immigrant groups, canids began moving into Chicago quietly. Seeking a place to live undisturbed, isolated individuals promptly blended in, sheltering in crannies, gleaning a livelihood by filling roles others wouldn’t. The rest of the city took notice only when a troublemaker appeared. Bob Long, who runs fishing programs for the Park District, has seen coyotes and foxes in surprising places on the south side. “As fishermen, we happen to be in places at times where others aren’t going to be, clambering around in the rocks on the lakefront at 4 AM,” he says....

Beatriz Marinello, the first female president of the U.S. Chess Federation, attends many chess tournaments, and usually the milling hordes there are almost entirely male. The morning of Saturday, May 14, was different. In the hallways of the Holiday Inn next door to the Merchandise Mart, girls, oblivious to passersby, plopped themselves down on the patterned carpet next to the elevators, unrolled white-and-purple vinyl boards, set up pieces, started their portable double-faced black-and-white clocks, and banged out moves....

Jerry Reinsdorf said this about Jay Mariotti on WBBM radio on June 22: “The best thing to do is for people to bring to the public’s attention the things that he does that are inappropriate. And I think you’ll see more of that happen going forward.” Oh, and Reinsdorf, the White Sox chairman, also called him a “piece of garbage.” This was a couple days after Ozzie Guillen, the White Sox manager, called him a “fucking fag....

Renaldo Chatman was released from Stateville on Christmas Eve after serving 18 years for robbery. He was given a bus ticket and told he had 24 hours to check in with his parole officer. His brother in Chicago took him in, but outside the wall it was tough to get on his feet. “For 18 years all my bills and meals was paid by the state, and I was basically told when to sleep,” he says....

Turbonegro are the scariest-looking bunch of faux homos this side of the Baltic Sea. Plenty of people consider these Norwegian glam-punk deviants nothing but a novelty act, and I’m sure the Clockwork Orange makeup doesn’t help–neither do singer Hank Von Helvete’s “assrockets,” the Roman candles he stuffs in his can and lights onstage. (In a 2005 interview in the OC Weekly, bassist Happy-Tom said, “Our image isn’t really gay–we’re just really, really good-looking....

In Michael Bradford’s rich play, five African-American men witness a murder outside a barbershop in 1950 Georgia. All are weary of fighting for dignity in a racist world, but only one argues for action against the white killer while the others are afraid to speak out. Bradford captures the experiences of different generations of black men: the young have been traumatized by fighting World War II while the old remember lynchings....

Recently retired Chicago architect David Munson says his 17 sculptures at Roy Boyd “mix up the inside and the outside. There’s no sense of enclosure, and that would be very difficult to achieve in a building.” He says Elliptical Skeleton 1 was inspired by the spinal surgery his wife was undergoing: here wooden “ribs” are supported by a vertical steel tube at the center and connected with aircraft cable; rectangular wooden panels attached to the tube resemble vertebrae....

DEFYING GRAVITY, Brown Couch Theatre Company, at the Athenaeum. This meditation on flight as a metaphor for human efforts to encounter God never quite reaches the profundity of its predecessor The Little Prince. But when author Jane Anderson forgets her tight little scheme long enough to present relationships between the characters, she creates some wonderful moments. She tells the story of teacher Christa McAuliffe’s death on the Challenger through scenes between the astronaut and her daughter, an elderly husband and wife who travel to Florida to see the launch, and a NASA maintenance man and his girlfriend....