Since the early 90s J Church has quietly been putting out smart, catchy pop-punk records at a breakneck pace. To date the band has released six albums, 18 split singles, and four full-length singles collections–the most recent being 2001’s superbly titled Meaty, Beaty, Shitty Sounding (Honey Bear). That three-chords-no-waiting approach still has a spontaneous energy, but singer-guitarist Lance Hahn infuses familiar personal-political punk fodder with an unusual degree of subtlety: on the early tune “Bomb,” it’s hard to tell if he was calling pre-Internet punks to armed revolution, spoofing the Situationists’ antibourgeois rhetoric, or just spinning a yarn about blowing up a department store....

Donald Shoup didn’t title his new book “Aparkalypse Now,” but he considered it–anything to get across his thesis that the U.S. has too much parking and it’s too cheap. He went for the oxymoron over the pun and called it The High Cost of Free Parking instead. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Shoup teaches city planning at UCLA but thinks like an economist. He argues that just as there’s no such thing as a free lunch, there’s no such thing as a free parking space: the cost just gets added to the price tag of other things....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Just be sure to pick up more than you leave behind. Openlands Project and the Forest Preserve District are sponsoring a cleanup day along the Little Calumet River, which flows through south suburbs including Calumet City, Harvey, and Blue Island. (Sign up at 312/863-6253.) According to the email announcement, “This event is sponsored by McDonald’s and participants will receive a free McDonald’s lunch!...

At 74, Paul Taylor is still making musically luscious, emotionally complicated dances–and lots of them, their common threads his clean style and classic theatrical presentation. Though Taylor made brief forays into radicalism (in 1957 he performed a motionless solo that prompted a four-inch blank review by Louis Horst) and his work is being presented this weekend by the Museum of Contemporary Art, it’s far from avant-garde. But that’s the worst you can say about it....

Willful Creatures: Stories This new collection has the feel of a sequel: it’s less resonant overall. But Bender does succeed with a few fanciful setups such as the one in “Dearth,” a story about a passel of potatoes that appear in a woman’s cast-iron pot one morning and return daily, despite her attempts to get rid of them. After they develop toes and fingers, she accepts them as her brood. Then, in a moment of doubt, she buries them alive....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Richard M. Daley Campaign Committee doesn’t have a Web site, at least not one that I could find, so I called the mayor’s press office at City Hall and asked for a number for Terry Peterson, who’s supposed to be running the reelection campaign–not that it officially exists. “We don’t know how to reach him,” the receptionist told me....

I have a swim-cap fetish. I don’t know why; it’s not like I saw my grandmother bathing with a shower cap on or anything like that. My GGG girlfriend is willing to wear a swim cap during sex, and I think that’s wonderful, but it goes beyond that. I go to the pool several times a week on the way home from work. Not because I like swimming or need the exercise, but because I want to see women in swim caps....

When a new niche opens up in any system, be it ecological or technological, the normally incremental process of evolution goes completely bonkers as everyone and everything tries to find the best way to exploit it. That’s how you end up with stuff like bear-size prehistoric armadillos and turn-of-the-century cars with fake horse heads on the front. Right now the music industry is just this kind of free-for-all–the Internet has destroyed the notion of the CD as the standard format, and the major labels’ failure to adapt to that change has created a power vacuum that’s being filled by a variety of contenders pursuing new ideas about how to deliver music to the public....

Youthful energy defines this new musical, a collaboration between Lookingglass, Natya Dance Theatre, and the Chicago Children’s Choir: some four dozen young musicians, dancers, and actor-singers crowd the stage. Based on the Hindu epic the Ramayana, the show follows the adventures of Princess Sita and Prince Rama as they fall in love, get separated by an evil demon, then reunite. But this is musical comedy with a difference: its message, means, and feeling are fundamentally devotional, in the tradition of the Indian dance form bharata natyam....

OK, before asking my question, I have to admit that I got the idea for it from an episode of Beavis and Butt-head. Anyways, can I hop in a box, have a friend take me to the post office, and send myself to far-off destinations? If I can, would it be cheaper than airfare? I’m sure Beavis and Butt-head aren’t the first to think of this; has anyone else tried it?...

Friday 20 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » MELK THE G6-49 Listening to Melk the G6-49’s Glossolalia (Joyful Noise), it’s almost impossible to believe that there are only two musicians in this Indianapolis band, playing bass and drums. Somehow they’ve found a way to get all the power of a quartet, complete with a resident guitar hero and a mad-scientist electronicist, without having to deal with two extra guys in the van....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve seen a few blogs talking about how former Catherine Wheel front man Rob Dickinson shot an entire video on his cellphone and how this could potentially change the world. But everyone is talking about the tech, not the video itself, which is a shame. (The phone is really nice, although for $700 or so I would kind of expect it to take some bitchin-ass full-motion video, and maybe also have a bottle opener or chiropractor function or something....

“Freaks, wonders, and human cock-oddities, the likes of which your eyes have never seen before,” Ken Harck calls from a four-foot-high platform on an expanse of hot pavement in the Midwest Bank Amphitheatre. This is what’s known in the sideshow business as the “grind”–a stream of chatter meant to lure passersby into the tent–and he keeps it up all day long in a nasal drone. Harck’s dressed for the part: white shirt, vest, and pants and a black fedora with a feather....

Chicago’s first-ever festival focusing on work created by and about artists with disabilities includes performances, visual art, film and video, lectures, and workshops presented throughout the city and in some suburban locations Thursday, April 20, through Sunday, April 30, with several visual art exhibits running beyond those dates. More than 50 cultural institutions and community groups are participating; all venues are wheelchair-accessible and have accessible restrooms. Many performances include audio description, word-for-word captioning, or sign-language interpretation....

The Chicago International Documentary Festival (which debuted last year as the Chicago International Doc Film Festival) continues Friday through Thursday, April 9 through 15. Screenings are at Facets Cinematheque; Northwestern Univ. Thorne Auditorium, 375 E. Chicago; and the Society for Arts, 1112 N. Milwaukee. Unless otherwise noted, tickets are $8.50, $7 for seniors and students, and $6.50 for shows before noon or after 10:00 PM. Passes are available for $125 (20 screenings), and $70 (10 screenings), but only the first includes admission to the closing-night gala; for more information call 773-486-9612....

Countersued! Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In 1999 Hodes challenged the financial management and record keeping for the program, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs that gets 1.33 percent of the cost of any new public building to spend on public art. That suit was settled when the city agreed to publish an annual public art financial report. Four years later Hodes sued again, charging, among other things, that the program wasn’t adhering to requirements of the Open Meetings Act....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » We’ll wrap up this week’s look at the best box sets of 2006 with another Rhino entry called What It Is!: Funky Soul & Rare Grooves. At first I didn’t really get this set, culled primarily from labels once owned and distributed by the WEA corporation between 1967 and 1977, aside from the fact that, yes, most of it was pretty funky....

The word journeyman usually isn’t intended as a compliment in music criticism, but it’s high praise in the case of sexagenarian singer-guitarist George Stancell, who’s been plying his rough-hewn brand of blues-inflected soul for decades. Little known outside Milwaukee, Stancell was discovered playing at his own club there in the late 90s by vocalist Johnny Rawls, who was working as an A and R man for JSP Records; Stancell recorded his 1999 debut album, Gorgeous George, for the label....

The Silent Theatre Company–remounting its 2005 production of Lulu, a cultishly adoring tribute to Frank Wedekind, G.W. Pabst, and Louise Brooks–deserves attention for its sheer technical prowess. The movement is expressive and tightly choreographed, especially in a breathtaking date-rape dance duel. The monochromatic visual palette is perfect, alluding to expressionist greasepaint and swank Jazz Age glitz. The coordination of the intertitles and piano score, which holds everything together, is expert. But on a second viewing, what makes Lulu truly arresting is director Tonika Todorova and company’s sly, deadpan mastery of the early silent era’s acting, lighting, and editing conventions....

In graduate school I rented a cheap two-bedroom house in desperate need of a paint job and an inside-out cleaning. On the bottom shelf of the dining room closet I found a Polaroid with “Junebug” written across the bottom. My roommate and I assumed it was the nickname of one of the three people in the photo, all decked out in what we imagined to be their Saturday-night finest. We were enchanted by them, but with so little to go on, we had to invent a history for them....