Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Interest in America’s musical past is almost as old as American music, but since the Anthology of American Folk Music, the legendary box set assembled by Harry Smith and first released in 1952, was reissued on CD by Smithsonian Folkways a decade ago, there has been a more or less steady effort to uncover and make available just about every blues, old-time, gospel, and country record made prior to World War II....

The unprecedented 1930s drought turned rich midwestern farmland into barren desert. Think of American Gothic as the “before” picture. First exhibited in 1930, Grant Wood’s iconic painting of a lean farmer–posed with his pitchfork and sturdy wife–depicts the hard, fruitful way of life that would be wiped out over the next decade. Dustbowl Gothic takes Wood’s painting out of its frame and sets it in sweet, sad, exceedingly beautiful motion. The farmer’s now a bachelor, the wife a mail-order bride....

Eels front man Mark Oliver Everett, who goes by E, is a depressive’s depressive. On his 1998 masterpiece, Electro-Shock Blues, he dealt head-on with the deaths of his parents and his sister’s suicide and seemed a likely suspect to join the dour party of eloquent sorrow that Nick Drake, Ian Curtis, and Elliott Smith are no doubt throwing somewhere. But on Blinking Lights and Other Revelations (Vagrant), the Eels’ sixth studio disc, I hear a tenacious survivor; E’s obsessively listing the things that make his life hell, sure, but he’s also keeping track of all the things that make it worthwhile....

When his debut album, Red Hash, came out in a run of 2,500 copies back in 1973, folk rocker GARY HIGGINS was in jail, serving 13 months for selling hashish. He never released a second disc–after he was freed he returned to music as a hobby rather than a vocation–but earlier this year Drag City reissued Red Hash on CD, and Higgins is now a darling of the burgeoning neo-psych-folk community....

Blues singer Little Al Thomas largely models himself on suave stylists like B.B. King, but the force of his delivery and the pugnaciousness of his phrasing reflect the decades he spent shouting over crowds on Maxwell Street. That training also sharpened his instincts as a crowd-pleaser: he can rock hard enough for a beer-soaked roadhouse but has enough church in his thick vocals to satisfy fans of down-home soul. He’s sometimes struggled to reconcile styles on record, but 2002’s In the House (CrossCut), recorded live in 2000 at a blues fest in Lucerne, Switzerland, captures Thomas at his best, performing with his longtime group the Crazy House Band....

Kerry Vitali, 41, is a graphic designer at Houghton Mifflin. She’s partial to vintage clothes and especially hats; she guesses this one is from the 1940s. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Kerry Vitali: It’s kind of for people to ask what it’s for. That whole monogram thing, I always thought it was a little dopey. It’s kind of my joke. KV: They do get people’s attention....

The National New Play Network, a consortium of theaters devoted to developing and producing new work, presents its second biennial festival. Eighteen plays–some previously seen elsewhere, others slated for future production, yet others just waiting for a chance to reach an audience–are performed in concert readings or staged readings. The fest is a joint effort of two local troupes, Prop Thtr and Chicago Dramatists, and two other midwestern companies, Ann Arbor’s Performance Network and the Phoenix Theatre of Indianapolis....

On a Mission for Money Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At press time there were still seats open on the Illinois Arts Alliance bus bound from Chicago to Springfield on Thursday, April 22. It’s not exactly a mass march, but IAA executive director Alene Valkanas says she’s hoping to gather 150 to 200 supporters in the state capital for Arts Advocacy Day, including at least one from each of Illinois’ 59 senate districts....

Pat Mallinger has grown into a wonderful saxist in the last several years, but many listeners already know that from his weekly wee-hours gigs with the Sabertooth Organ Quartet at the Green Mill. So the surprise this weekend will likely be Bill Carrothers, the best underappreciated pianist in jazz today. Living on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula gives him a relatively low profile, but he’s got a strong and engrossing approach: a magisterial mix of gauzy sentiment and bold, blunt phrasing, plus an ability to adjust to a variety of contexts....

PREFUSE 73’s new Security Screenings (Warp) is as much a clinic as an album. Few hip-hop producers, mainstream or underground, are capable of creating such dense sampladelic patchworks–Scott Herren not only nicks from a sprawling range of genres, somehow making every chopped-up bit fit snugly among the others, but constructs his tracks so that they develop over their length in satisfying and tuneful ways. On last year’s Surrounded by Silence a distracting parade of guest vocalists and musicians blunted the impact of his production, but the new one puts the focus back where it belongs–there are only two guests, Four Tet’s Kieran Hebden and TV on the Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe, and they appear on one track apiece....

I’m a relatively inexperienced 26-year-old young lady. I have basically spent the last four years celibate, in a dead-end relationship that I’m finally out of. Recently, I met a much older man, 41, who is extremely experienced and has had a history of being totally freaky (golden showers, porn, etc). He’s got a pretty healthy sexual appetite, and I’m having fun trying to match it. (Gotta make up for those four years....

On August 23 at 7 PM, Mayor Daley marched into the gymnasium of Falconer Elementary School, took a seat at the center of a long table, and officially brought this year’s budget hearings to the northwest side. To start Daley offered a recitation of his administration’s accomplishments–schools built, streets paved, garbage collected, cops put on the street, etc–and a promise to keep taxes low. “Chicago finances are in solid shape, and the city continues to find new ways to save money,” he said....

A dark, dirty bit of sidewalk outside a south-side Red Line station doubles as the office of Chris and Henry*, partners in a small-time bootleg CD hustling operation. It’s ten o’clock the Friday night before Independence Day and scraggly fireworks blossom over the roof of a high-rise across the street. The bootleggers are planted between the Plexiglas station doors and the bus stop at the curb, barking at strangers making their way to the train....

Restaurant listings are compiled by Kate Schmidt from the Reader Restaurant Finder, an online database of more than 3,500 Chicago-area restaurants. Please submit new listings or updates (include phone numbers) to restaurants@chicagoreader.com or Restaurant Listings, Chicago Reader, 11 E. Illinois, Chicago 60611. Restaurants are reviewed by Reader staff and contributors and (where noted) individual Raters. Though reviewers try to reflect the Restaurant Raters’ input, reviews should be considered one person’s opinion; the collective Raters’ opinions are best expressed in the numbers....

Wal-Mart won’t say how much it spent trying to influence the City Council’s vote on the big-box minimum-wage ordinance, which the aldermen passed 35-14 on July 26. But we can make an educated guess. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » David Vite, head of the Illinois Retail Merchants Association, says his group hired lobbyists and a legal team to fight the ordinance, which will boost wages to $10 an hour plus $3 an hour in benefits by 2010, but that Wal-Mart paid for the barrage of advertising before the vote....

Brigid Murphy’s handbag–big and structured, made of attractively worn black leather and sporting red handles–is not by Marc Jacobs, Chloe, or any other must-have designer, but everyone seems to think it is. “If I go in a fancy store, they think it’s Prada,” she says. In fact it’s Sears Roebuck, an old bowling bag that belonged to her now-deceased father-in-law. When she kept getting stopped by people demanding to know where she got it, a friend suggested last fall that she start refurbishing and selling them....

Though she sometimes uses electronics to expand her palette, Swiss violist Charlotte Hug finds more primitive, organic ways to create sounds on her most recent solo album, 2003’s Neuland (Emanem). By either moistening or slackening the hairs of her bow, she broadens and deepens her music, generating dual lines and unleashing double-stops that sound like an LP of a thrummed guitar played at 16 rpm. The heart of the album is a ten-piece suite called “House of Detention,” which was inspired by a visit to London’s dank, dim underground prison of the same name....

Those who follow dance are obsessed with bloodlines–it’s assumed that one person’s movement style can infiltrate another’s body. When Compagnie TcheTche appeared at Montreal’s international dance festival in 1999, New York Times reviewer Anna Kisselgoff noted the connections this all-female Ivory Coast company has to the modern-dance world: artistic director Beatrice Kombe has worked with Mathilde Monnier, and Monnier’s mentor was Viola Farber, Merce Cunningham’s former partner. Now, as part of the AfroContempo Festival, Compagnie TcheTche makes its Chicago debut with Kombe’s Geeme, a duet said to have been “ignited by the waste of war....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Two new Turkish restaurants opened recently and I’ve sampled each in the last few days. Cafe Orchid, at 1746 W. Addison, is in the space formerly occupied by another Turkish restaurant, Demir Paradise Garden. Owned by a family hailing from Ankara, it has a large dinner menu filled out with familiar items: lentil soup, hot and cold mezzes, kebab, shish, doner, veggie plates, quite a few seafood items (calamari, mussels, trout, swordfish), and pastries....

This touring program runs Friday through Thursday, May 26 through June 1. Unless otherwise noted, all screenings are by video projection at Facets Cinematheque, and tickets are $9, $5 for members. For more information call 773-281-4114 or visit www.facets.org. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » R The Liberace of Baghdad Originally director Sean McAllister planned to make a movie about life in Baghdad immediately after the so-called end of the second gulf war, but when he befriended Samir Peter, the articulate, funny, resolutely chain-smoking title character of this 2004 documentary, he opted instead to train his video camera on him....