El crimen perfecto With Guillermo Toledo, Monica Cervera, Luis Varela, Fernando Tejero, Kira Miro, and Enrique Villeri Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Like any good maker of black comedy, Iglesia measures his humor in deviations from the norm. His debut feature, Mutant Action (1993), was a grungy sci-fi adventure about a group of deformed gonzos who carry out terrorist missions against beautiful celebrities and the culture of personal attractiveness....

Which Way to the New Weird America?; Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Though Foster’s otherworldly soprano and unusual phrasing have drawn comparisons to 60s British folk icons like Shirley Collins and Anne Briggs, she didn’t have the chance to hear much outside the mainstream as a child in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. “My exposure to stuff usually came about in weird ways,” she says. “The first time I heard Debussy was on a Barbra Streisand record…the first time I heard jazz was on Willie Nelson’s Stardust....

Three bankers moved out of their offices high above LaSalle Bank’s main branch in the Loop for a few days last week so Abelardo Morell could turn their rooms into cameras. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » No one’s sure how or when the camera obscura was invented, but it’s been known since antiquity that when light passes through a small hole into a darkened room (or box), an inverted image of what’s outside appears on the opposite wall....

Last Friday, as Chicagoans faced a weekend of liberating their cars and sidewalks from a foot of snow, local filmmakers Ben Redgrave and Ben Berkowitz were jetting off to Park City, Utah, for the Sundance Film Festival. The two Bens–whose feature Straightman opened the 2000 Chicago Underground Film Festival–planned to try to snag studio financing for their next one, Polish Bar. It’s a major step for Redgrave and Berkowitz’s six-year-old partnership, the Benzfilm Group....

Last year, when she was in second grade, Kristie De Luna couldn’t wait to do her homework. It was assigned for the whole week each Monday, and she’d come home and want to tear through it all. “I’d get tired,” says her father, Gonzalo, “and have to persuade her to save some for later.” Chicago’s center, open to kids 6 to 18, has been in the works since 2003, when executive director Leah Guenther, then a grad student in English lit at Northwestern, and a handful of other writers, teachers, and students met at one of Eggers’s appearances....

Each week this Chemically Imbalanced Comedy team selects a disparaging theater review from the latest Reader and performs an hour-long improvisation of “the show we feel the critic would have rather seen.” When I went, they read aloud Zac Thompson’s review of Invasion of the Minnesota Normals (which he said “tries to make a case for individuality without exhibiting any”), then acted out a 50s-sitcom version in which clean-cut citizens revolt against normalcy by smoking, embracing homosexuality, and eventually killing....

Singer-songwriter Cass McCombs, who recently moved to Chicago, makes music so ethereal it seems to build in slow motion out of nowhere, like frost. On his third full-length, Dropping the Writ, due next month on Domino, he’s in much the same mode as on his previous releases: his airy ballads channel the high romance of vintage Neil Young and other California folk rockers of the 60s and 70s, and his unusual voice, hollow and tapering like Elliott Smith’s, drifts through the songs like a cold autumn wind through an abandoned motel....

Having seen several misguided productions of Joseph Heller’s less-than-perfect stage adaptation of his own brilliant antiwar novel, I wrongly believed the script could never really work. But Steep Theatre’s staging of Catch-22 is smart and fast paced, and whole scenes that had been deadly dull in earlier shows spring to life (like the one where Yossarian and an Italian whore become entangled in an infuriatingly circular argument: he wants to marry her, but she won’t marry him because she thinks he’s crazy because he wants to marry her)....

Looking back on the halcyon days of American underground rock circa 1988 or so, before the post-Nirvana feeding frenzy made everything “alternative” (turns out “the year punk broke” was an ending, not a beginning), Dinosaur Jr loom a lot larger for me than they did at the time. I remember seeing them at my college in upstate New York (before a group of 70s washouts forced them to add “Jr” to their name) and thinking, “Huh, not bad”–but if memory serves they were opening for Live Skull, and that’s who I was really excited to see....

Though legendary rock ‘n’ roll flukes have sometimes had a bit more in them (see Silver Apples), it makes sense that the Monks didn’t–being a pissed-off American GI in 1960s Germany is a circumstance that’s hard to sustain or reproduce. So their debut and sole LP, Black Monk Time, remains sui generis, and really, it’s better that way. The story of this abrasive, inspired masterpiece is natural documentary fodder, and head Monk (abbot?...

Howe Gelb conceived of his latest album after sharing a bill with a pair of black gospel choirs in Canada in 2003. Curious to find out if gospel’s soaring harmonies might mesh with his own brand of rickety, lurching roots rock, he asked a church director there if one of the choirs might be open to working with nonreligious material. “Sure, if you keep it positive,” he was told. Gelb meets that criterion on ‘Sno Angel Like You (Thrill Jockey), recorded with Ottawa’s Voices of Praise (as well as Arcade Fire drummer Jeremy Gara and a couple of guest guitarists)....

Landmark This! The colors of the original were rich–Root wrote of “the right of color to be recognized as an independent art”–though determining exactly what they’d been required some detective work. A consultant analyzed 60 old paint samples under a microscope and came up with a palette of five basic colors, from a brick red on the main body of the church and roof to a jute brown on the arches, windows, and doors....

Chicago has a great music scene and a great theater scene; our comedy scene is like a Saturday Night Live farm. In the culinary department lately, the eyes of the world are on us. And hey, if you believe the sloganeers at the Chicago International Film Festival, we’re the Film Capital of the World. But no one has ever even pretended that we’re anywhere near the cutting edge when it comes to fashion....

Lead Story In September 23-year-old flamenco star Juan Manuel Fernandez Montoya–aka Farruquito–married a teenage girl in a televised ceremony in Seville, Spain, that included the Gypsy custom called the “test of the handkerchief,” in which the bride’s friends demonstrate her virginity by collecting three drops of blood from her hymen. The new Mrs. Farruquito passed the test: footage of the stained handkerchief was aired on all of Spain’s major TV networks....

I used to work here as a waiter, and I have a vivid memory of a dreadful night in the courtyard using the hose. A friend and I were out playing pool and drinking Long Island Iced Teas, and then we started in on some shots that tasted like fingernail polish remover–I have no idea what they were, but they were free so we drank ’em. I think we had three of them, and by that time we were pretty drunk, so of course we decided that we wanted to drink some more....

The Pillowman | Steppenwolf Theatre Company INFO 312-335-1650 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After several years’ hiatus McDonagh reemerged in 2003, at England’s National Theatre, with The Pillowman, set in an unnamed totalitarian state. The play got raves when it arrived on Broadway last year, and like his earlier works, this one–now being performed by Steppenwolf–provides some uniquely discomfiting thrills. But in stepping outside his literary home turf, McDonagh seems to be straining for the stylistic coherence that once flowed effortlessly; for one thing, the “totalitarian state” here is pretty sketchy....

Roland Emmerich’s latest summer blockbuster is an exceptionally stupid movie. Of course the consensus is that summer blockbusters, even ones that come out in the spring, are supposed to be stupid. But occasionally a summer blockbuster is also expected to offer some food for thought. The Day After Tomorrow, the latest big-budget SF disaster flick, broaches—or stumbles over—the issue of global warming, or what I prefer to call Bush weather, a topic that’s surely worthy of some reflection....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bill Fay was one of the most interesting and literate folk-rockers to emerge in England on the cusp of the 70s. He made two superb albums for the Decca subsidiary Deram—1970’s Bill Fay and 1971’s Time of the Last Persecution, both reissued last year by Eclectic Discs. He was backed by some of the country’s most progressive jazz musicians of the time, players who were conversant in myriad styles and shared a sophisticated improvisational and harmonic language....

Not long ago, a certain woman went from being my brother’s fuck buddy to being his girlfriend. From what I can tell, she’s GGG (or maybe he is) and they have a creative sex life. I’m in my mid-30s; my brother and his girlfriend are in their early 40s. In an effort to ensure that my son is as gay as a goose when he grows up, my boyfriend and I bought season tickets for the Seattle Mariners....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » (1) If you’ve listened to the Mountain Goats, you’ve probably had your head knocked by the hugely good words that John Darnielle writes. Seriously, if he wasn’t a complete word wizard that band would be like the sad Barenaked Ladies. He’s also good at blogging, and right now at his music blog Last Plane to Jakarta he’s working on a project called Thirty Poems About My Favorite Black Metal Band, which is exactly what it says it is....