On Milwaukee near Western and the old Congress Theater, in a storefront that once housed a hardware store, balmy April smog filled the air-conditioning-free new home of the Autonomous Zone anarchist collective. Assorted dogs orbited a weathered, dreadlocked white guy nicknamed Diamond as he drank red wine and munched bread on a folding chair in the main room, a dim, generous space with a high ceiling and a long-neglected hardwood floor....

Antibalas, the 17-piece Afrobeat band from Brooklyn, have never made any secret of their slavish worship of Fela Kuti. From the expansive James Brown-inspired vamps to the tightly coiled rhythms to the politics seething beneath the party, they seem determined to carry the torch, even if they’re mistaken for a tribute band now and again. On their brand-new second album, Talkatif (Ninja Tune), they do little to distance themselves from their primary influence....

BOBBY RUSH Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Singer and harpist Bobby Rush calls what he does “funk folklore”: over greasy, danceable grooves, he tells, sings, or acts out ribald fables with morals like “A man can give it, but he sure can’t take it” and “One monkey don’t stop no show.” A lot of his tricks, both lyrical and musical, were pretty well-worn even before he got his hands on them, but like old jokes told and retold at family reunions, they’re all the more endearing for their familiarity....

In May 2001 the House Theatre blew into town from Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Just two years later–on the strength of their hit The Terrible Tragedy of Peter Pan and a slew of hyperbolic notices–they’ve wrestled their way to the forefront of the storefront scene. Like most overnight successes, the House has enjoyed some outrageous good fortune, showing up at just the right time for critics with a jones to discover the next Lookingglass or Redmoon....

Dick Danger, DJ Crimesolver, Factory Theater, at the Athenaeum Theatre. Those who can finish the phrase “Clapton is…” or name the Beatles’ original drummer will pass DJ Dick Danger’s rock kindergarten–and enjoy this crime-solving caper from George Brant. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » David Bryson exudes self-confidence as Dick Danger, the “Sherlock of Rock.” When he’s not on the air, he encourages the rock ‘n’ roll dreams of his timid intern (a scene-stealing Jim Simon) or fights with his stressed-out boss (Justin Fletcher, barking out orders) over the new hire, a woman newsreader....

Toast: The Story of a Boy’s Hunger This gap is what makes Nigel Slater’s new book, Toast, richer than the average food memoir. Slater, author of several best-selling cookbooks in the UK and the beloved weekly columnist for the Observer, has written a very English book, and its foreign qualities are both totally charming and oddly challenging. A slim 238 pages, Toast embodies both the strongest and the weakest traits of the genre....

Jonas Mekas has long been a leading advocate for avant-garde film, producing a large body of criticism from the 1950s to the ’70s and founding the Anthology Film Archives in New York City. But he’s also an inspired and original diaristic filmmaker whose work combines short bursts of images, speeded-up motion, and improvisational in-camera editing. These two shorts, assembled from footage Mekas had shot decades earlier, include John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Andy Warhol, and Jacqueline Kennedy, yet they offer more than celebrity watching....

“Dear God: I knew you would eventually punish music geeks my age for the garage-rockabilly-retro faddism we have committed, and I was ready for the lash. Still, don’t you think turning the music underground into one long flashback to the junior-high dance is laying it on a little thick?” On the other side of the Abbey Pub’s bathroom door, the pitiless DJ pitched another 80s pop smash into my fiery pit....

MATHIEU DUFOUR WITH THE CHICAGO SINFONIETTA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At 27, Mathieu Dufour, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s new principal flutist, is one of the youngest section leaders in any major symphony. The Paris native has been a principal player ever since he graduated from France’s national conservatory in Lyon–from 1993 to ’96 in Toulouse and then in the Paris Opera’s pit orchestra....

In the late 1980s, a sensational case in Georgia caught the attention of Paul Carter Harrison, a playwright and director who’s taught at Columbia College for the past 20 years. “A beautiful young black woman revealed that she’d had carnal relationships with three white priests,” he says. “What’s more, she also had intercourse with a black archbishop, who might have secretly married her. She claimed that one of them was the father of her child....

New David, Same Goliath Ann Christophersen joined the board of the American Booksellers Association after her own store, Women & Children First, took a hit from the big chains in the 1990s. Early this month she was elected ABA board president, making her the first Chicagoan and the first owner of a feminist store to head up the 102-year-old trade group. Christophersen says the ABA has created a more level playing field for independent sellers in the last few years, but the long-term outlook is worrisome....

It was Valentine’s Day a year or so ago, and a group of us rowdy girls were celebrating a screw-Cupid, antiromance evening. We’re all pretty much martini girls. Around our fourth or fifth round a woman started observing our table, almost lurking. She came over to me and was like, “Is that an apple martini you’re drinking?” It seemed odd, but I said, “Yes, it is. Do you want to try one, can we get you one, can I help you?...

It was one of those nights that makes you want to rush right home and shower, a night when you pop vitamins before bed in a vain attempt to stave off a hangover, a night peopled by incredibly tan, round-tittied, ashy-highlighted, shiny-lipped women in skirts so short they need two hairstyles, pursued by incredibly tan, gel-headed, waxed-chested, clear-nail-polish-manicured men in striped button-down shirts. It was a regular ol’ Thursday night at Crobar, and DJ Jordan Zawideh had decided to spend his birthday there....

My vote for 2002’s most dreadful single goes to “Sunglasses at Night,” the recent club smash from the Montreal duo Tiga & Zyntherius: their smug irony makes their version even lamer than Corey Hart’s 1984 original. But Tiga at least has redeemed himself. His current mix CD, American Gigolo: The Best of International Deejay Gigolo Records (Turbo), is the best of the current glut of new-electro compilations, which might seem like faint praise, since most of them aren’t worth the plastic they’re shrink-wrapped in....

In art dealer David Leonardis’s eyes, the difference between New York and Chicago is that you get to take your asking price and “add a zero.” So in January, after ten years in business, Leonardis decided to close his Wicker Park space and head east. In February he put a Going Out of Business sign in his window and had a clearance sale–100 pieces priced at $100. Then he made sales 30 days in a row, and a new sign went up: “Staying in Business!...

Low Winners Never Quit Nonetheless, the crossroads is busier than ever these days. A growing number of acts with Christian members and messages–among them Sunny Day Real Estate, Damien Jurado, and the Danielson Famile–are gaining larger audiences and learning to cope with the contradictions. On February 9, a bill at Metro pairs two of the most successful such acts, Seattle’s Pedro the Lion and the Minnesota trio Low. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

German guitarist Annette Krebs doesn’t play chords, lines, or riffs when she improvises. In fact, her guitar makes none of the noises you’d expect from that instrument. As with an ever increasing number of improvisers who use their axes as pure sound generators, Krebs makes miniature aural gestures, delicate shapes that disappear almost as quickly as they emerge. Using electronic processing and a variety of contact mikes, which she arranges on different parts of the guitar to amplify physical actions instead of string vibrations, Krebs paints wonderfully alien squiggles, swooshes, and splatters....

Friday 11/7 – Thursday 11/13 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Curator Olga Stefan says the artists included in the new exhibit Palpable Disequilibrium: Contemporary Art in Romania are barely recognized in their own country. “They’re really marginal. No one understands it, and there’s no real market for art–especially contemporary art.” Stefan, who immigrated to Chicago from Bucharest in 1983, has chosen political work for this show of interactive, site-specific installations....

At 4:25 AM on June 30th, Luke Welsh is already fishing for perch off the pier at Belmont Harbor. It’s the last day until August that perch fishermen are allowed to keep what they catch, and the end of the best month of perch fishing Luke has ever seen. Some of the old-timers claim to have seen better, but Luke, 40, has fished the north woods of Wisconsin and a good number of Minnesota’s 10,000 lakes without ever seeing such an abundance of big perch....

Vladimir Girshkin, the hapless hero of Gary Shteyngart’s first novel, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook (Riverhead, 2002), is born in Leningrad, moves with his parents to the United States as a child, and gets schooled in the folkways of the upper middle class in New York City and at a bucolic Ohio liberal arts college. By the time he’s 25 he’s an insecure, nervous, gloomy citizen of nowhere in particular. After falling victim to a completely improbable chain of events involving a socially demanding Fifth Avenue girlfriend, his best friend’s drug-dealing boss, and a batty fellow emigre who talks to his bedroom fan, he flees to post-Soviet eastern Europe and seizes the opportunity to reinvent himself–this time as a success....