Rex Grossman has prominent eyebrows that give him an impish appearance even inside a football helmet. This triumph over anonymity is something Grossman shares with the Bears’ last two championship quarterbacks, Jim McMahon and Bobby Wade. A single-digit uniform number is another. Both McMahon and Wade wore number 9, and both harbored reputations for recklessness on and off the field. But it takes more than that to make a championship quarterback....

AUDREYS 4/30, EMPTY BOTTLE; 5/7, SUBTERRANEAN Though they’ve been at work in Chicago for two years, the Audreys are only now releasing their debut recording, #13 (No Holds Barred). Earlier, unreleased material from the band has been making the rounds–some of it produced by Voidoids guitarist Ivan Julian–but this EP is all new. Deceitfully simple and bittersweet a la Television or the Velvets (with a touch of Karl Precoda in the blazing psychedelic solo of “The Paisley Sound”), this is what the Strokes should’ve been....

Amy Guth is a comedian by training–she got into the funny business after college, while working a handful of jobs in Manhattan, and studied at the Second City Training Center after moving to Chicago in 2001. “I was the one who could be talked into falling or crashing into things,” she says. “I didn’t see a lot of women doing physical comedy of any kind, so I thought I’d give it a whirl....

Josh Paul looked elated, and why not? After years of scuffling just to make the opening-day rosters of the White Sox and Cubs, he was in the playoffs as the Angels’ third-string catcher. Born in Evanston, and still a Naperville resident in the off-season, Paul was all smiles as he took batting practice at White Sox Park before the first game of the American League Championship Series. When a Chicago reporter asked him about the hair sprouting on his face, he said, “Playoff beard, just like the NHL guys–grow until you’re done....

When the Walkmen’s plangent anthem “We’ve Been Had” showed up in a Saturn commercial, fans understandably winced. Selling out is one thing, but the way the admen had transformed an ambivalent look at the passing of youth into a standard-issue bill of goods was almost too much to bear. Given their history, however, it was hard to hold it against the boys in the band. The group’s core members are survivors of Jonathan FireEater, perhaps the most spectacular disappointment of the mid-90s....

To the editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mr. Brewer chooses to attack me on a false issue, the multipurpose building project at Devon and Rockwell. This project not only goes a long way to relieve parking problems on Devon and its neighboring side streets, but will also reduce traffic on these very side streets–the parking garage has 231 parking spaces. What Mr. Brewer does in his letter is claim community support in his opposition to this particular project, a project which has passed without opposition through public hearings, the Plan Commission, the Economic Development Commission, the City Council committee on zoning, and finally the full City Council....

Though BORIS have been hosanna’d loud and long–and rightfully so–for the devastating heaviness of their rocking, I think they still deserve a little more praise for their flexibility. Last year this Japanese trio released Altar, a sprawling, entrancing collaboration with Sunn 0))), and in May the local Drag City label gave a stateside release to Rainbow, their much more song-oriented but still pretty spacey album with Ghost guitarist MICHIO KURIHARA. Rainbow is absolutely gorgeous, moving with fluid confidence from elegiac, grandiose post-Hendrix pyrotechnics to insinuating Amsterdam-dope-cafe lounge folk; its dizzying dynamic range encompasses sky-lifting guitar-shaman psych rock, rattled by thunderous drums and shimmering with sheets of wah-wah, and patient, delicate atmospheric pieces that sound perfect for summoning skittish spirits....

It’s easy to get all snarkiferous toward the Boss whenever he emerges, slimed with pundit slobber, with an album that’s overblown or otherwise flawed in some crucial way. (If there ever was an artist who should be banned from using synthesizers, it’s him.) His latest, Devils & Dust (Columbia), doesn’t have such problems, but even if it did I’d still have a hard time snarking: last winter I was obsessively rediscovering Nebraska, and “The Rising” scratched a post-9/11 itch I didn’t know I had....

In the 1970s and ’80s many Bulgarian musicians lived in fear of serving prison time: as part of a depressing communist-era attempt to foster national unity, ethnic music, particularly Turkish and Gypsy, was strictly forbidden. Weddings, because they were private, became the underground venue of choice, but clarinetist Ivo Papasov and saxophonist Yuri Yunakov, the two lead members of the group playing tonight, both served brief jail terms when they played together in a band called Trakiya....

Even if you hated the Pixies for their moneygrubbing comeback tour last year, you gotta give ’em credit for jump-starting the Coctails’ reunion. Their gig opening for the Pixies at the Aragon inspired them to speed up work on Popcorn Box (Carrot Top), a three-CD set that collects early tracks, vinyl-only rarities, and outtakes, documenting their transformation from faux-lounge act to quasi-jazz quartet to pop-rock band. Back together for the first time in years, the Coctails decided to book a brief tour of Japan–Tokyo pop-art company Presspop Gallery had contacted them with plans to create a set of action figures of the band (which has always been about the kitschy merch) and release a ten-inch EP, Let’s Enjoy....

With his new history, Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity (AK Press), Dan Berger, a 25-year-old PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania and coeditor of last year’s Letters From Young Activists, attempts to fill in the blanks left by Sam Green and Bill Siegel’s 2003 documentary The Weather Underground. A meticulously researched account of the radical movement’s rise and fall, Berger’s book is more intimate than Green and Siegel’s film, drawing on dozens of oral histories and interviews he conducted with former members and associates, giving much more attention, for example, to the prehistory of Students for a Democratic Society (from which Weather famously split in 1969) and the group’s slow dissolution after 1976, as members slowly came in from the cold....

Pianist Emanuel Ax, who’s probably best known for his chamber collaborations with artists such as Yo-Yo Ma, has won several Grammys, including one for his outstanding recordings of Haydn piano sonatas. He returns to Ravinia on Monday to play all four Chopin ballades, written between 1831 and 1842. Each is an entirely different universe, yet they’re all poetic examples of this artist’s passion on a larger scale than his waltzes, mazurkas, nocturnes, or preludes....

In this Judeo-Christian/new age fantasy by Tom Dudzick, who also wrote the semiautobiographical Over the Tavern, an uptight New Yorker brings his Jewish atheist fiancee home to his devout Catholic parents for Christmas. It seems your typical holiday angst fest until the mentally challenged younger brother begins channeling a supernatural being (who’s apparently British), throwing everyone’s beliefs into question. This much suspension of disbelief is a stretch, even at Christmastime. But as the parents, Denyse Leahy and Don DeCarl enliven and sweeten the play’s surprising epiphany: he’s a gruff marshmallow and she’s a dingy wisewoman in the manner of Archie and Edith Bunker....

“Where’d the soul go? / It’s all about the video,” Leela James sings on “Music,” the first song on her debut album, A Change Is Gonna Come (Warner Brothers). Laments like that have become a cliche in the neosoul camp, but James can be forgiven since she’s actively redefining the genre. She coproduced the album with a who’s who of contemporary soul and hip-hop figures, including Kanye West, Raphael Saadiq, James Poyser with Vikter Duplaix, and Commissioner Gordon (who worked on The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill), who all draw on up-to-date production techniques; though the album doesn’t have a live-band sound, the music still imparts a strong blast of classic soul feeling....

Presented by the Music Box and Movieside Film Festival, this 24-hour marathon of horror movies begins at noon on Saturday, October 13, in the Music Box’s main theater, 3733 N. Southport. Tickets for the whole marathon are $29, and ticket holders may leave and reenter the theater. Showtimes are approximate; for more information call 773-871-6607 or visit musicboxtheater.com. Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein Bud and Lou as two delivery men with an oblong package for Frankenstein’s castle....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The North Dakota senate voted in March to make it easier to obtain a concealed-weapon permit by eliminating the shooting test, in which applicants must hit a human silhouette, about a foot and a half square, seven times out of ten at 21 feet. Permit holder Carey McWilliams, 31, of Fargo told an Associated Press reporter he disapproved, saying, “I don’t think everybody under the sun should just be able to walk in and get a weapon....

Last August I was asleep in the bedroom of the apartment I shared with my boyfriend, Brett, who was at work. About 1:30 in the morning I woke up and the floor was on fire. It was a small fire and I was groggy, so I tried to put it out with water–a big mistake since it was an electrical fire from a lamp. It quickly spread to the dirty laundry on the floor, and the smoke was getting bad....

Over the years violinist Pinchas Zukerman has sometimes played as if he were suffering from boredom or malaise, but when his Zukerman Chamber Players appeared at Ravinia in 2004 he seemed reborn, performing with the same passion, intensity, and visible joy as his younger colleagues, including cellist Amanda Forsyth, who has an extraordinarily deep and rich tone. She and Zukerman showed plenty of onstage chemistry, so it wasn’t surprising to learn they’d recently married....

Bassist-vocalist Al Cisneros and drummer Chris Hakius, once two-thirds of the mighty Sleep and now both halves of the duo OM, named their latest album, Conference of the Birds (Holy Mountain), after a 13th-century Persian Sufi epic whose title is more often translated as “The Parliament of the Birds.” To my ears “conference” has a sort of fluorescent-lit office-bound quality to it, but there’s nothing else mundane about the album: Cisneros and Hakius may not have the maniac energy of Sleep guitarist Matt Pike, who now fronts High on Fire, but their long-haul focus produces its own kind of catharsis....

Cafe Lumiere With Yo Hitoto, Tadanobu Asano, Masato Hagiwara, Kimiko Yo, and Nenji Kobayashi “It’s very difficult to cross national borders and shoot a film about a different culture. How many films have you seen that do that successfully? There are very few. The reason is very simple. When we look at films [about our own country] made by foreign companies, they’re not accurate. . . . But it’s an interesting challenge....