You probably know all about the two big nostalgia acts on this weekend’s Intonation bill: the 60s power trio Blue Cheer is stopping here for a rare performance, and acid-damaged Texas rocker Roky Erickson will play his first gig outside his home state in more than two decades. But there’s a quieter comeback happening early Sunday afternoon that may be of just as much interest to local music fans. Bill Dolan, the guitar whiz behind the mid-90s band Five Style and its successor, Heroic Doses, will play a set with two of his old musical foils, bassist Matt Lux and drummer John Herndon....

Plenty of people call Brent Gutzeit an electronic musician, and you can’t really blame them: as a member of the trio TV Pow, he’s played dozens of concerts using nothing but a laptop. But he can do plenty more than point and click: He played bass in the Bowie-esque pop group Everyoned and contributed scrabbling acoustic guitar and sonorous snoring to a hilarious unamplified TV Pow gig last October at the Spareroom....

Friday 7/2 – Thursday 7/8 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Part soft-core porn provider and part online community for punk, goth, and emo kids, the three-year-old SuicideGirls.com is one of the few postbubble Internet success stories, claiming 500,000 visitors a week. Earlier this year a half dozen of the site’s pierced and tattooed models hit the road with the Suicide Girls Live Burlesque Show (which came through Chicago in February) and now they’ve spun off into even older media with SuicideGirls, a coffee-table book of color pinup photos and diary entries by the girls....

Via Due Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After buying the empty lot next to his west Lincoln Park trattoria Via Carducci several years back, Giovanni Scalzo has opened a second, less formal restaurant there. The new place, a cozy enoteca called VIA DUE, is a big room with 30-foot vaulted ceilings, a handsome bar, dim lighting, and white tablecloths. Chef Joseph Cosenza tampers lightly and inventively with tradition, using baby octopus and caramelized sweet onions in the grilled calamari and serving pizzettes (minipizzas) topped with combinations like Swiss chard, pancetta, and buffalo mozzarella or sausage, mushrooms, and onion....

If I were Derrick Sanders, artistic director of Congo Square Theatre Company, I’d produce anything Chadwick Boseman wrote, however ungainly, implausible, wrongheaded, or misbegotten. Because it’s a sure thing that eventually he’d give me something great. Unfortunately, Deep Azure isn’t great. Written entirely in rhymed couplets that bounce between hip-hop and pseudo-Shakespearean diction, this supernatural murder mystery is both wrecked and–almost–redeemed by Boseman’s enormous creative energy. On the one hand, the couplets are gratuitous, and the buildup is overblown for the predictable payoff; on the other, Boseman displays a dramatic intelligence and audacity that make the show work even as it’s failing....

In The Compass, a history of the fabled mid-50s Chicago company that revived improvisation as a source of creativity and entertainment, Janet Coleman tells how Compass actors abandoned improv ideals–being in the moment, playing the “where”–in favor of crowd-pleasing jokes. The tension between form and laughs has been a staple of the genre ever since. You can see it tugging at the six-member CarniKids Productions cast. Trouble is, nobody here has the chops yet to succeed at either pole....

Some events require advance registration or reservations; please call ahead to confirm your plans. friday26 Night of the Living Dead: The Musical George A. Romero’s zombie allegory, now with singing and dancing. a Through 10/27: Fri-Sat 8 PM, Riverfront Playhouse, 11-13 S. Water St. Mall, Aurora, 630-897-9496, $12-$15. Dick’s Last Resort Halloween Blowout With a costume contest, Halloween-themed food and drinks, and music by the Houseboyz. a 7:30 PM, Dick’s Last Resort, 435 E....

Listings of holiday craft fairs, trunk shows, open studios, and special gallery events will run through December. Send information to artlistings@chicagoreader.com. Mercado Navideno Holiday market featuring hundreds of unique items from Mexico. Museum members receive a 25 percent discount. a Fri-Sun 11/24-11/26, 10 AM-5 PM, Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum, 1852 W. 19th, 312-738-1503. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Shop at the Cultural Center Trunk shows featuring different local designers and artisans each week....

I DO! I DO! | AMERICAN THEATER COMPANY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » And possibly alter cocker wannabes. I Do! I Do! appeals primarily to idealized feelings of nostalgia, which I suppose can include nostalgia for things one hasn’t experienced–and given current statistics, probably won’t–like a long and more or less happy marriage. The show as revised by Weber follows its two characters, Michael and Agnes, from their wedding night in 1957 (the original starts in 1895) to the day in 2007 when they move out of the Chicago house where they’ve raised their two kids, launched Michael’s successful writing career, and suffered their midlife crises....

Mark Newport: New Works This tired pop-culture trope is at the heart of an exhibit by Mark Newport currently on display at the Chicago Cultural Center. Newport, an Arizona textiles professor who has knitted nine superhero costumes and added his own embroidery to seven comic-book covers, explained his motivations in an interview with the Sun-Times: “Knitting, beading and embroidery are traditionally thought of as somehow being female. Superheroes are [predominantly] male....

Fifteen years ago a coalition of school reform activists decided that since control of the schools had just been turned over to local school councils, most of the bureaucrats at the central office could go. They wrote a “Sunrise Statement”–a reference to the new day they saw for public schools–in which they vowed to help eliminate as much of the central office as they could. But within a few years Daley made it clear he wanted the system changed....

Money Changes Everything Two days later Tate fired contributing editor Mick Dumke. Dumke says he offered to resign if he could stay long enough to wrap up the project he was on. But Tate wanted him gone immediately. The following Monday she fired associate editor Brian Rogal when he came in to work, having called his mother to try to track him down beforehand. Reporter Rupa Shenoy soon quit. Reporter Sarah Karp went on maternity leave....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Shortly after the New England Patriots won the Super Bowl in February, Louisiana State University professor Leigh Clemons went to the NFL’s official merchandise site, NFLshop.com, and tried to order a jersey personalized with the name of a former student of hers, Patriots cornerback Randall Gay. But when she entered “Gay” in the “Name” field, an error message appeared reading “This field should not contain a naughty word....

If you’ve tried to rent a practice space in Chicago, you’ve probably wished you had rich parents. But the three brothers in local garage quartet the Safes–bassist Michael and guitarists Frankie and Patrick O’Malley–say they don’t mind ponying up the money themselves, since their music-obsessed kin have already given them a priceless gift. Their carpenter father, who played Irish folk and rock with the Frank O’Malley Band in the 60s and 70s, raised his four boys (and seven girls) on the good stuff–Hank Williams, Fats Domino, Magic Sam–and in the early 80s an older cousin turned the brothers on to the Clash, Iggy Pop, and Husker Du....

Much of the attention at Touch and Go’s 25th anniversary celebration this fall went to bands that were reuniting, but I was more excited about the Ex, who’ve worked constantly for 27 years without ever growing soft or complacent. Never afraid to venture outside the postpunk comfort zone, the Amsterdam-based combo recently composed music for a Dutch stage production of A Clockwork Orange (in which they also played antihero Alex’s droogs) and collaborated with 71-year-old Ethiopian saxophonist Getatchew Mekuria on the just released Moa Anbessa (Terp)....

Trax Records: The 20th Anniversary Collection (Casablanca Trax) This bizarre belated outpouring of official recognition is thankfully irrelevant. Frankie Knuckles hardly had to wait around for Chicago to acknowledge his enormous influence on the world of dance music. When Knuckles moved to town in 1977, he set up the Warehouse, which would become the most important dance club in Chicago history. His residency there, along with DJ Ron Hardy’s sets at the Music Box and the Hot Mix 5 radio shows on WBMX, shaped the mid-80s postdisco dance style that took its name from Knuckles’s roost: house....

The Perils of Public Art Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On August 16, nearly five years after the city of Evanston commissioned artist Lincoln Schatz to create a $170,000 sculpture for its Maple Avenue parking garage, Evanston officials will finally dedicate the resulting work. It won’t, however, be the cluster of giant Plexiglas disks Schatz proposed five years ago–and it’s not located anywhere near the garage....

It’s hard to find any flaws on Tokyo Police Club’s debut, A Lesson in Crime (Paper Bag): clocking in at 16 and a half minutes, the EP’s seven songs spring into action, say their piece, and clear out as quickly as they came, like a NASCAR pit crew. The Toronto quartet has been together only since last year; after a show at the 2005 Pop Montreal fest landed a demo in the hands of the Paper Bag folks, word quickly spread about the band’s tight-wire, up-tempo postpunk hooks and lean melodies....

Warlocks The creative arc of the Warlocks–who for a few years were very, very close to the Grail–can be instructive on this point. Front man Bobby Hecksher did a stint with the Brian Jonestown Massacre before starting the Warlocks in 1998, and like the BJM’s the band’s early records were ambitious and grating and joyously, dorkishly energetic, like college boys waxing rhapsodic about opium. They might have just been applying fuzz to pop songs all dressed up in black and love beads with nowhere to go other than someone else’s dorm room, but they did so better than anyone since the Jesus and Mary Chain....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “There was an op-ed [by Dan Savage] in Wednesday’s New York Times asserting that 70 percent of Americans personally know someone who is gay. That seems statistically improbable. Somewhere between two and four percent of American males identify themselves as gay. (The figure is much lower for women.) Most of them are congregated in cities, and in those parts of cities known to be gay-friendly....