Nimer Salem stands in the doorway of his cousin’s corner store in West Garfield Park waiting for the protesters to arrive. It’s Saturday afternoon, a bright, hot day, and while he waits, little kids walk into the building at Madison and Keeler and walk back out with sodas, candy, and freezer pops. African Supermarket, which Salem manages for his cousin, also sells diapers, milk, eggs, toilet paper, cigarettes, beer, liquor, and lunch meat, some of which is made with pork....

During the sessions that would produce “Great Balls of Fire,” Jerry Lee Lewis famously fought with Sam Phillips about the sinfulness of rock ‘n’ roll. Phillips thought it could actually save souls; Lewis insisted it was worldly and corrupt. “I got the devil in me!” the Killer shouted. Many a Christian rocker since has played out that argument internally, trying to reconcile his relationship to Jesus and his relationship to the music....

You can’t see Hiroshi Sugimoto’s 30 black-and-white studies of architectural interiors and exteriors, most from the 20th century, when you stand on the threshold of the galleries where they’re displayed, just an austere grid of gray monoliths on a gray concrete floor. But once inside the shadow-creased rooms, you can follow the track lights trained on the far sides of the monoliths to his astonishing five-foot-wide, six-foot-tall black-and-white photos, whose subjects range from the World Trade Center to the Eiffel Tower to Marina City to the Museum of Contemporary Art....

To the editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One aspect of your story was not clear, however. Attorney Camillo F. Volini was called in after the Cambodian Association had already lost their property. Mr. Volini was engaged to help them file a petition with the Indemnity Fund pursuant to an agreement they had entered into with the tax buyer. At that point, it was a crisis situation in which the petition to the Indemnity Fund had to be filed right away....

Lead Stories Time Out New York reported in December on a meeting of “gainers” and “encouragers,” a gay subculture made up of men who overeat as a turn-on and other men who get a sexual thrill out of enabling them. The meeting was organized by 42-year-old filmmaker John Outcalt, who calls being gay and fat “the final taboo” and admits he’s a “chub chaser” who likes watching bodies “going from point A to point B…whether it’s gaining hair, getting larger, or getting fat, I find it sexy and exciting....

This Friday is the last chance to see Tangible Instability: Contemporary Art in Romania at the Barat College Art Gallery, but an expanded version of the exhibit, “Palpable Disequilibrium,” opens November 7 at LIPA Gallery in Chicago and runs through December 7. A pair of panel discussions–one in each location–herald the closing and reopening of the interactive show. At the suburban panel, artists Dan and Lia Perjovschi and curator (and former Around the Coyote director) Olga Stefan will discuss the social and political context of their work and that of the other artists, Ioan Godeanu and Teodor Graur, in the Barat show....

The on-line zine Metal Observer recently featured a short essay by “Alex” celebrating the granddaddy of metal aesthetics. No, not Ozzy, and not Jimmy Page either. Not even Anton LaVey. Alex chose instead to trace the influence of an Oxford linguistics professor, nearly 30 years dead, who amused himself in his spare time by devising his own languages and populating an imagined world with different races that might speak them. Pundits kvetched over the recent Waterstone’s poll that named this antimodernist’s masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings, the best-loved book of the 20th century, but their questions about literary merit were even less pertinent than usual....

“Even I roll my eyes when I hear about another Holocaust documentary,” filmmaker Aviva Slesin recently told the New York Times, speaking with a candor that’s still reserved for Holocaust survivors. According to the Times there have been 69 such films released since 1990 alone, yet honest criticism of the burgeoning genre is often inhibited by its grave subject matter. Slesin’s contribution looks at children (like herself) who were saved from the death camps by non-Jewish families who passed them off as their own, and its fixed moral compass of heroes, villains, and hunted children makes for a fairly dull collection of talking heads....

It took about 40 years for the turntable to join the guitar, bass, and drums in rock music’s arsenal. The process went a lot faster at the Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for Girls in Portland, Oregon: this summer the camp, which since 2001 has offered instruction in playing instruments and singing for girls ages 8 to 18, added a DJ/electronica program to its curriculum. According to Misty McElroy, the camp’s founder and executive director, the impetus for the new course came from the campers themselves....

MAKERS 6/28, EMPTY BOTTLE They’ve got stars in their eyes–and for all intents and purposes they might as well have them painted on their faces. Their seventh album, Strangest Parade (Sub Pop), is another step in the direction they veered off in on 2000’s Rock Star God, bringing a vintage-glam level of put-on to bear on the true-believer punk ‘n’ roll they made their name with. It’s sloppily beautiful and clumsily soulful, bowing to Bowie and saluting Slade and arrogantly pretending alternative rock never happened....

PAUL WESTERBERG 8/9, THE VIC I pulled out Paul Westerberg’s new “comeback” record, Stereo (Vagrant), with great trepidation. The guy had already hurt me at least once with a lousy record, but I got over it and got on with my life–so now I’m supposed to let him try again? (Yes, at this point bad records, especially from proven talents, do actually hurt.) But to be a rock fan is to be a little bit of a sucker: if we want to catch the next amazing thing, we’ve got to keep our hearts open even as we stick sardonic Band-Aids over the wounds from the last dozen half-assed attempts....

Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay: An Anthology In the middle of Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay, a new anthology edited by University of Florida journalism professor William McKeen, there is a photo of Bob Dylan taken at a mid-60s press conference. He’s wearing a black corduroy jacket over a polka-dot shirt, and though the harsh lighting of the room may have something to do with it, he looks like hell–his skin is pasty, his eyes unfocused, his hair not just wild but obviously untended....

Friday 17 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » STRUTS With Kelly Hogan focusing on her jazz-pop combo the Wooden Leg and Nora O’Connor plugging her surprisingly assured country-folk debut album Til the Dawn (Bloodshot), Struts gigs have been less frequent this year. But the group, which also features guitarist Andy Hopkins, has reconvened for the holidays, and their brand of dance-party R & B and quirkily arranged covers–like AC/DC songs done up Stax-style–should be a welcome treat....

Thriller Theater Five: Scooby-Doo Meets Happy Days, Argos Agency, at ImprovOlympic. This year the kinky cartoon gang travels dozens of miles (and two decades back) to 1950s Milwaukee, where Fonzie, Richie, et al are struggling to rid beloved burger joint Arnold’s of a ghost. Cast members represent their TV characters well, especially returning players Ryan Gowland and Katie Nahnsen as Fred and Daphne and Jacob Schneider as the Fonz. Writer-director Jason R....

Rock, Pop, etc. GREG BOERNER Free in-store performance. Sat 11/16, 8 PM, Borders Books & Music, 1144 Lake, Oak Park. 708-386-6927. ANI DiFRANCO Sold out. Sat 11/16, 8 PM, Chicago Theatre, 175 N. State. 312-443-1130 or 312-559-1212. MIKE GORDON & LEO KOTTKE All ages; sold out. Wed 11/13, 7:30 PM, Park West, 322 W. Armitage. 773-929-5959 or 312-559-1212. HEWHOCORRUPTS, DON’T WORRY ABOUT IT, SPITALFIELD, CHALET CHALET Fri 11/8, 6:30 PM, room 130, McGaw Hall, DePaul University, 802 W....

Noise musicians can generally be divided into two camps: storytellers and punishers. But local introvert Blake Edwards is really neither. He’s interested mostly in destabilization; any narrative-seeming structure he creates is just raw material to be broken down. On such releases as the split seven-inch with Coeurl he released in 2001 on his own Crippled Intellect Productions (which also publishes Edwards’s chapbooks of short fiction, poetry, and drawings), droning, muted clanging gives way to piercing static and squeals like air escaping from a balloon, illustrating how easily meditation can turn into anxiety....

“I can’t move my neck,” Vassie said, sensing the party going on behind his shoulder. He knew he was in Rachel’s apartment because he could see the Clash poster over the wicker chair and the ferret’s cage in the corner, but he couldn’t turn to see who else was in the apartment. When Vassie got there the girls from the club had offered him a joint while Rachel was in the shower....

David Murray’s quest to save the old house on Paulina (“Our House,” February 1) struck me as being more self-serving than community service. After all, who wants a huge condo development being built next to their home? But more importantly, what Mr. Murray fails to realize is that he, along with his other yuppie neighbors, is very much responsible for destruction of Chicago’s old housing. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

When Acme Steel decided in the early 90s to spend $400 million turning a Riverdale cornfield into “a continuous thin slab caster/hot strip mill complex,” Archie Lieberman saw a photo opportunity. He persuaded Chuck Nekvasil, Acme’s director of investor and public relations, to hire him to document the construction. “My main point was to show the bravery and the skill that went into building the plant,” says Lieberman, who’d worked with Nekvasil photographing other steel mills but is probably best known for his book Farm Boy....

Avast! It’s Artboat! The going rate for a 10-by-12-foot booth at Art Chicago is $4,500. That’s a big bite for a young gallery, and as a result not many are represented at the annual expo, lust as they may for the buyers who attend it. For a while now the scruffy upstarts have staged their own events the same weekend as the big show, competing with each other to lure a few of the deep pockets from Navy Pier into other parts of the city to look at their wares....