BLACK KEYS This rust-belt duo’s third album, Rubber Factory (Fat Possum), was recorded in a makeshift studio the guys set up in an old tire plant, which is almost too bad in a way; it’s funnier to imagine deliberately crude rattlebag stuff like this being generated bit by bit in some high-end digital emporium. Probably couldn’t happen, though–feel isn’t just a myth, after all. The band’s sound displays a few new traits, including occasional ballad-friendliness and a 70s blues-rock sense of structure: there’s more than a little ZZ Top here, and “10 A....

VALENTINA LISITSA AND ALEXEI KUZNETSOFF Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s a compliment to any piano duo to say they play like a married couple. And Ukrainian-born pianists Valentina Lisitsa and Alexei Kuznetsoff, who’ve been performing together for close to 20 years, have actually been a married couple for more than a decade–though it’s tempting to see their romantic relationship as an inevitable offshoot of their extraordinarily intense onstage rapport....

At Studio X, a dance club above a A Gap commercial that aired several years ago marked the apex of the swing-dancing craze of the 90s, when clubs swelled with enthusiasts in vintage clothing reliving Depression-era nightlife. In Chicago, 70 or so diehards can still be found out on the town on a nightly basis. Saturday evenings most end up at Studio X, operated by Evin Jacobson and Noel Galang, both 29....

The Bug In 1984 I worked in some lofty executive suites, however, as the lone male secretary. There I saw plenty of incompetence and wasted effort, including the CEO’s much ballyhooed “task force on innovation,” made up entirely of the stodgiest, least creative executives he could find. I used to call it the “task force against innovation” to my boss, a talented man naturally excluded from the group, which usually made him laugh....

The tenth annual Chicago Underground Film Festival runs Wednesday, August 27, through Tuesday, September 2, at Landmark’s Century Centre. Tickets are $9, a $30 pass admits you to five films, and a full festival pass, good for all screenings, is $100. For more information call 866-468-3401. Following is the schedule for August 27 and 28; a complete festival schedule is available online at www.chicagoreader.com. Films marked with an * are highly recommended....

David Thomas has carried on a highly ambivalent engagement with rock ‘n’ roll for nearly three decades. As a member of Rocket From the Tombs and Pere Ubu he helped write punk history with songs like “Sonic Reducer” and “Non-Alignment Pact,” but during the Ubu hiatus of the mid-80s his solo work swapped guitars for accordions and bassoons, and when the band made its ill-starred lunge at the brass ring in the early 90s Thomas’s contemptuous onstage manner made it seem like he viewed rock concerts as empty rituals....

DOUG CARN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Doug Carn’s music scratches just the right spot between soul and jazz, the one that gives “acid jazz” fans a special tingly feeling. Though he’s an accomplished pianist and lyricist, it’s his deeply groovy, roots-conscious organ playing that’s earned him a capital-city star on the big map of blues-based music–and it’s as an organist that he’s coming to Chicago....

Your front page story in the 2/9 edition (“It Came From Within”), covering the angst of horror-movie buff Lawrence McCallum, read like a grade-B horror-movie script. There are many Lawrence McCallums wandering the bleak urban horror show we call the city, and anonymity is the rule rather than the exception. Using a synopsis of The Day the Earth Stood Still as the focal point for delivering McCallum’s story provided a notion of optimism to an otherwise strange and banal existence....

This haunting dance-theater piece by Barcelona choreographer Marta Carrasco portrays our trembling, confused emotional lives. Short related pieces–set to well-chosen music that ranges from Tom Waits and Edith Piaf to Mozart and Schubert–evoke the disconnect between outward expression and inner feeling. In one, a woman moves sinuously and sings a French love song while on another part of the stage a second woman is tossed drunkenly, almost violently, between two men, barely able to hold herself up....

Jim Talent spends his days tethered to skyscrapers with a safety harness, installing communications towers hundreds of feet in the air. When he reports to his second job, however, things get scary: “I walk in the front door of the house, announce myself to the ghosts, and say, ‘Don’t fuck with me,’” he says. Along with four partners, Talent runs Dream Reapers–a 14,000-square-foot stretch of strip mall in Melrose Park that’s considered one of the best haunted houses in Illinois....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One proposal to remedy the “social discontent” of Iranian men, many of whom are postponing marriage because they can’t afford to raise families, has been to allow a form of prostitution that agrees with Islamic law: the men would enter into temporary marriages (lasting only a few hours) with the prostitutes, who would live in government-run brothels called “chastity houses....

In the days before Michael Jordan, the kids around Cabrini-Green played a lot more baseball. Lou Carter, who grew up there in the 70s, was one of those kids. “I didn’t play basketball until the seventh grade,” he says. “Believe it or not, baseball was king.” Then baseball got pushed aside, and basketball became the year-round rage. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But Carter’s favorite sport by far was baseball....

RAISED BY LESBIANS, Green Highway Theater, at the Viaduct Theater. It’s not easy being the child of lesbian parents, especially if you’re an awkward 16. Do you feel abnormal because you’re being raised by lesbians or simply because you’re a teenager? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Playwright Leah Ryan explores this question with a thoughtful, engaging, broadly funny play incorporating two versions of the same story....

Reporters’ Creed: Keep It to Yourself At the bottom of the ad was a list of 62 names of “Chicagoland Jews” who “support the courageous Israeli reservists…and join with them in their call to end Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip as a crucial step to peace.” Other Jews were urged to speak out. Peres had sent them a check too. And though today she’s not certain whether she’d told Not in My Name she didn’t want her name on its ad, she has no doubt about Tikkun....

Secret Weapons? On an impulse possibly unique in the history of human gratitude, he decided to do something decent for a journalist. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Two months have passed since Birch launched his crusade. There was a flurry of some 50 letters. They didn’t win Stevens her column back. “We may even have hurt her,” Birch told me the other day. “That’s what worries me....

Norah Jones That’s a damned good hook: the music put visions of back porches, dusty roads, and big, big sunsets in my mind while the lyrics built a lament that tugged at my heartstrings, and the CD wasn’t half a minute along. The song, “Don’t Know Why,” leads off one of the more talked-about releases of the season: Rolling Stone picked Jones as one of ten artists to watch this year, and the New York Times Magazine expended 1,000 words comparing her to the likes of Nina Simone and Sarah Vaughan....

This two-month showcase of Chicago sketch comedy features more than 30 local ensembles–some well established, some new to the scene–representing a remarkable range of styles and viewpoints, with two or three groups sharing the bill at each performance according to the schedule below. Participating troupes include Stir-Friday Night!, Annoyance Productions, Weaselicious, Brick, ÁSalsation!, GayCo Productions, Teenage Sports Parade, and many others; the festival is presented by Posin’ at the Bar. Sketch Fest runs January 12 through March 2 at the Theatre Building, 1225 W....

We are from a farming community that grows a lot of corn. Ethanol (alcohol) and corn production are both heavily subsidized. My thinking is that they both are “pork barrel” projects. Doesn’t it take as much or more fossil fuel energy to produce a given amount of ethanol energy? Maybe the ethanol lobbyists and producers aren’t telling us the full story? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Maybe not, but who can blame them?...

On the day Deep Roots was entered in a turf race at Arlington Park, Omar Razvi had the flu. But some horses are worth getting out of bed for. He’s been into the horses since he was a student at Rolling Meadows High School. One afternoon his mother gave him $150 to pay the air-conditioning repairman. The repairman decided to spend the money at Arlington, and invited Razvi along. They bet together and split the winnings....

Rock, Pop, etc. ASCAP CABARET: HER TURN with Babbie Green, Karen Mason, Sharon McNight, Lindy Robbins & Adryan Russ; Chicago Humanities Festival program hosted by Jason Graae under the direction of Michael Kerker & Dan Stetzel. Sold out. Sat 11/2, 7:30 PM, Thorne Auditorium, Northwestern University Law School, 357 E. Chicago. 312-494-9509. CKY performs at Tony Hawk’s Boom Boom Huckjam. Sat 11/2, 7 PM, United Center, 1901 W. Madison. 312-455-4500 or 312-559-1212....