Rock, Pop, Etc. DEVENDRA BANHART Free in-store performance. Sat 4/5, 2 PM, Reckless Records, 1532 N. Milwaukee. 773-235-3727. ANI DIFRANCO, BITCH & ANIMAL Sold out. Sat 4/12, 7:30 PM, Rialto Square Theatre, 102 N. Chicago, Joliet. 815-726-6600 or 312-902-1500. WARREN HAYNES, PETER HIMMELMAN, LUCE, MICHAEL MCDERMOTT Mon 4/7, 6 AM-1 PM, Yak-Zies, 3710 N. Clark. 773-525-9200. ELTON JOHN, BILLY JOEL Thu 4/10 and Sat 4/12, 7:30 PM (4/10 & 4/12 sold out), Allstate Arena, 6920 Mannheim, Rosemont....

While putting together a collection of my film pieces for an upcoming book I included an appendix listing my 1,000 favorite films and videos made between 1895 and the present–features and shorts, live action and animation, narrative and experimental. The point was to cite not the works I consider the most important historically but the ones that still provide me with the most pleasure and edification. Of course, it’s also a truism that the closer you get to the present, the likelier it is that a favorite will eventually be forgotten....

Coming from almost anyone else, Belle & Sebastian’s “Step Into My Office, Baby” (“I wanna give you the job / A chance for overtime”) would sound dirty. But from these twee Scots, for whom temerity has never been an issue, it sounds more cute than creepy, as though they’ve finally decided that playing at grown-up can be as much fun as playing at permanent uni student. Dear Catastrophe Waitress (Rough Trade) is Stuart Murdoch and his crew at their most urbane, and if their idea of urbanity, and maybe adulthood altogether, seems largely copped from Doris Day movies, their willingness to set up shop on the corner of clever and foolish has always been endearing....

The Muffin Lady was finally busted. As the habitues of a handful of Wicker Park bars know, Shirley Pena–aka Shirley the Muffin Lady, aka the Bread Lady, aka Beverly Spahos–is celebrated less for her all-natural cookies and fruit breads than for her muffins, which sell for five bucks apiece and produce powerful effects on perception and coordination due to a “green leafy substance,” as the police report puts it, incorporated into the batter....

“Mothers who work more hours per week, on average, during their children’s lives, are more likely to have overweight children,” write economists Patricia Anderson, Kristin Butcher, and Phillip Levine in the third-quarter issue of Economic Perspectives, published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. “It is not working per se that matters, but working a lot of hours per week. This suggests that it is time constraints that may make it harder for working mothers to oversee their children’s diet and exercise....

Keeping track of the new machine. Fifteen of the 50 city aldermen have been members of the Chicago City Council since at least 1989. Political scientists Dick Simpson, Ruben Feliciano, Rick Howard, and Aaron Van Klyton of the University of Illinois at Chicago have compiled their voting records on contested issues in 1989-’90 and in 2000-’01, recording how often each voted with Mayor Daley’s floor leader, Ed Burke, on contested votes (www....

Are 2,430 Illinois families going to be on the streets in October? That’s how an August 13 Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report (“House Funding Level Would Lead to More Than 60,000 Fewer Families Receiving Housing Voucher Assistance”) reads the HUD appropriations bill passed by the House of Representatives on July 25. “About 63,000 vouchers in use by families will lose funding,” say the CBPP analysts, whose views are backed up by a Congressional Budget Office estimate....

JANG MO NIM, 6320 N. Lincoln, 773-509-0211: Korean dining doesn’t get much better than Jang Mo Nim. Mother and daughter Sun Pak and Rachel Hyun have been graciously serving their creative cuisine for 14 years, Hyun running the dining room with her excellent translation skills and Pak cooking with a passion. The menu describes their work accurately: “To the uninitiated palate, we offer exotic yet familiar flavors. For the connoisseur of hanshik (Korean food), we will astound and surprise....

In the four years Tania Bowers lived in Chicago she played out exactly five times. You’d never know from her unassuming demeanor and fragile onstage delivery that you were watching a woman who spent her late teens and early 20s rocking out in clubs all over Australia. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Spdfgh eventually expanded their repertoire to include songs by the Cure, the Ramones, and the Breeders, and in time began writing originals in a noisy indie-pop vein....

Easy Money Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » No one likes the idea of putting the government in the “sin” business, but as a serious objection this qualm lost its teeth with the advent of Lotto. Ditto for concerns that the state wouldn’t know how to run a casino (hire pros, watch ’em like hawks) or that it would increase government corruption (we’re talking Cook County here, right?...

Two days after Denzel Washington won his Oscar, Ansa Akyea sat chained to a wooden column in a barn in Du Page County. Next to him, wearing a convincing look of misery, shivered Kim Ferguson, in a performance enhanced by the near freezing temperatures of a late March cold snap. In another movie these actors would make a handsome couple. But in this one they played Harper and Alma Morgan, abused sharecroppers kidnapped by a landowner to whom they owe an impossible debt....

Keeping Up With the Joans Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » By the time Joan of Arc released The Gap (Jade Tree, 2000), the “band” was essentially Kinsella and a revolving cast of helpers, including engineer Casey Rice. When Owls released their eponymous debut album the following year, it seemed as if Joan of Arc was finished. “We never really intended to get back together as Joan of Arc,” says Kinsella....

MARSHALL VENTE PROJECT 99 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The hallmark of the annual Marshall Vente Jazz Festival has been its variety: over four packed nights of music, it’s often featured more than a dozen groups, only about a third of them actually led by Vente–the tireless pianist, arranger, radio host, and entrepreneur whose musical projects have ranged from intimate piano-and-voice duos to the rowdy Brazilian unit Tropicale to an 18-piece big band....

Hicham Chami was one of the last people critic Ted Shen interviewed for the Chicago Reader before he died unexpectedly last month. Chami, who was raised in Morocco, told Shen how he came to play the qanun, an Arabic instrument akin to a zither. “My father is a classical violinist, and my mother paints. They live for music. And they wanted their children to have a broad, cultivated upbringing.” But violin or piano didn’t seem right for the boy, who had a birth defect that left the fingers on his left hand stunted....

On her first three albums, LA’s Mia Doi Todd captured my attention with just voice and guitar, and her cryptic lyrics and mannered singing cast a spell on me even when I wasn’t quite sure what she was singing about. On her recent major-label debut, The Golden State (Columbia), producer Mitchell Froom adds a bunch of rare vintage keyboards (Chamberlin harpsichord, Claviola, and Orchestron among them), some distant-sounding drums, and the weightless electric guitar of Nels Cline to Todd’s basic sound, and her appealingly alien worldview doesn’t seem so alien anymore....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In December in Texas, death-row inmate Leonard Rojas was executed, but two months later three of the nine members of the state’s highest criminal court concluded that the lawyer appointed to handle Rojas’s appeals had been woefully incompetent. The lawyer, David K. Chapman, by his own admission did only cursory work: he rarely met with Rojas, failed to investigate the case, and by missing a filing deadline barred Rojas from a federal appeal....

Saxophonist Ornette Coleman always gets the credit for inventing free jazz. It’s true that he formally rejected the shackles of fixed rhythmic and harmonic structures in the late 50s, and that the epochal long-form recording he made for Atlantic Records in 1960 is actually called Free Jazz. These days, of course, it’s impossible not to hear Coleman’s innate tunefulness, but at the time his musical ideas were so shocking that at least one audience member physically attacked him and jazz traditionalists dismissed him as a charlatan....

I am a Middle Eastern guy who lived 21 years of my life in that region. This year I came to Canada. The sexual freedom in this country makes you feel more and more inclined to have sex with a girlfriend. Lately, I met this girl in an Internet chat room. She said she has a crush on me and offered to come and visit me in Canada, stay at a hotel, and have sex with me....

Soul singer Jackie Wilson died young and practically forgotten in 1984–after collapsing onstage in 1975, he spent eight and a half years drifting in and out of a coma. But Black Ensemble Theater’s musical biodrama resurrects his spirit in all its audacious glory. Originally opening in February 2000 for a seven-week run, writer-director Jackie Taylor’s homage to this seminal American entertainer played for nearly two years, then set out on a brief tour of the east coast....

During World War II, not long after Germany attacked the Soviet Union, a Soviet general (Vlasow?) and his entire army deserted to the German side and fought with the Nazis against the Allies. After Germany surrendered, the general and his army requested asylum, knowing they faced certain death if they were delivered up to Stalin. Eisenhower adamantly refused their request despite the pleadings of his own officers, and the general and his troops were sent to their deaths....