Anders Parker wrote and recorded a good part of the fourth Varnaline album, Songs in a Northern Key (E-Squared/Artemis), on a frozen lake in northern Vermont, and judging from the thick pile of press the album has generated since its release last summer, lots of people are certain that there’s a strong connection between where the album was made and the way it sounds. But I don’t really hear it. It’s the best thing Parker has done, but as on his previous recordings, the music seems to seethe from some dark inner space that’s oblivious to the weather, then soldiers forward with the muscle and drive of Crazy Horse....

On March 30 lease-termination notices arrived on the doorsteps of the two dozen people still living in the Tree Studios Building, the State Street complex that’s been home to artists for 107 years–longer than any other building in the country. The storefronts got the boot too. A few days later title to the Medinah Temple and Tree Studios complex, which had been owned by the Shriners fraternal organization since 1956, passed to a private investor group as part of a city-brokered $63....

Pianist Aaron Moore tends to stick to ambling boogies and shuffles, with simple but thoughtful solos that follow basic harmonic structures but plumb the nuances of each chord–a sound that grew out of his years on the Chicago blues club circuit in the 1950s and early ’60s. But unlike contemporaries such as Sunnyland Slim, he’s relaxed and jolly rather than drive-’em-down exuberant. He tosses off splayed right-hand chords and rolling turnarounds with a disarming ease, and his sure-fingered bass lines romp more than they rock....

APPENDIX OUT Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Crook of My Arm (Secretly Canadian), Alasdair Roberts’s first solo album, is an explicit statement of the love of British folk music that permeates his work in Appendix Out: it’s a collection of trad English, Irish, and Scottish tunes he learned from the likes of Shirley Collins, Anne Briggs, Dick Gaughan, and Nic Jones. The young Glaswegian isn’t as starkly mannered as his idols; instead, like kindred spirit Will Oldham, he projects a vulnerable intimacy that’s equally powerful....

One of the most common complaints about electronic-music performances is that there’s nothing to look at–unfortunately, watching someone move sound files around on a laptop or turn knobs on a mixing board just doesn’t cut it for most people. Slavek Kwi, who performs under the name Artificial Memory Trace, is particularly interested in this phenomenon: he sees himself as a “visual disturbance (dominant ‘optic attractor’) from listening.” The Czech-born sound artist (who fled his native land on foot back in 1986 and now lives in Ireland) makes his U....

Lou Reed Some will protest that there never was such a time–that Reed has been a man of letters all along. The case for Reed the Highbrow invariably begins with mention of poet Delmore Schwartz, a pickled beat that Reed knew as a student at Syracuse University who’s often referred to as his “mentor.” But literary reputations are not usually won through personal acquaintance with writers, and even if the objection is waived, the Delmore hookup still doesn’t cut much ice, given that Schwartz is remembered today almost exclusively for his connection to the young Lou Reed....

Friday 8/2 – Thursday 8/8 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 3 SATURDAY Black Harvest International Festival of Film and Video co-coordinator Sergio Mims and a friend were talking about the summer movie season and realized there were only two major black releases–Like Mike and Juwanna Mann. “She said, ‘Is this all we’re going to get?’ So many independent black films are made, but they hardly get any kind of release or distribution,” says Mims....

Does breast-feeding make babies smarter? Nobody knows for sure. Dr. Anjali Jain of the University of Chicago Children’s Hospital and two colleagues from Yale searched the medical literature and found 40 studies, from 1929 to February 2001, that considered the question (Pediatrics, June 6). They evaluated the studies–and had to throw out 38 of them. “Only 2 papers studied full-term infants and met all 4 standards of high-quality feeding data, controlled for 2 critical confounders, reported blinding [observers of the outcome didn’t know which babies were breast-fed], used an appropriate test, and allowed the reader to interpret the clinical significance of the findings with an effect size....

AUGUST Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Earlier this summer, while on a 12-city tour of Europe, Free Street’s Madjoy Theatrics youth ensemble passed time on Vienna’s U-Bahn by singing “Bohemian Rhapsody.” To their surprise, they made it through the entire song. The spontaneous performance gave them the idea for tonight’s Hit It rock ‘n’ roll karaoke fund-raiser. Intended to help bankroll a September trip to Germany–during which the group will collaborate with German and West African teens in Hamburg–the event will feature original music by three bands, who’ll also play covers the audience can sing along with....

Back in the day, all-girl orchestras might have had a world of technique and training, but they still traded primarily on their novelty value. (Think of the band portrayed in Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot.) When the women’s big band Diva first appeared in 1993, it did so with a whiff of that same gimmickry–the honorific “No-Man’s Band” certainly didn’t help–but it couldn’t overshadow the solid work of the musicians....

The Creation Records Story: My Magpie Eyes Are Hungry for the Prize Most of that talent was painstakingly pursued not by some massive A and R department but by CEO Alan McGee. When McGee founded Creation in 1983 there were two distinct approaches to releasing and promoting music in the UK–through independent labels like Factory, Mute, and 4AD, and through corporate channels like EMI and WEA. No one would have mistaken the production of an indie record for one funded with major-label money....

From Ring to Swing Gigolo Johnny spends his days as food-factory worker Mark Gallo. He spends his nights doing lounge-style gigs at the Babaluci restaurants in Bucktown and Hoffman Estates or rolling up to homes and businesses in his black Chevy sedan, unloading an array of speakers and minidiscs with instrumental versions of classic tunes, and putting on a show. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The crowd of 60 or so people laughed, and before they could answer he burst into his opening number, “It Had to Be You....

“There’s a Bosnian saying: If you plant pumpkins with the devil, they will be smashed against your head,” says Aleksandar Hemon, expressing his doubts about a new partnership between the National Endowment for the Arts, the Defense Department, and Boeing aimed at recording the experiences of American soldiers in Iraq. “I have not stopped being suspicious of any project that is blessed by Paul Wolfowitz or any state agency.” AH: Absolutely....

As a portrait of a compulsive and neurotic chef trying to coexist with other people–in particular an eight-year-old niece whose mother has been killed and an Italian sous chef who joins her kitchen staff–this is a well-made and entertaining romantic comedy-drama, providing ample proof that German writer-director Sandra Nettelbeck can turn out a classier commercial feature than most of her Hollywood contemporaries. (She’s helped in particular by ECM Records’ Manfred Eicher, whose selection of accompanying music–much of it drawn from his own catalog, including two fine Keith Jarrett cuts–is excellent....

Lead Stories Armed and Dangerous Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On April 17, sheriff’s deputies at the Daley Center decided to search not only visitors but also the people who work there and usually enter without inspection. Among the several dozen items confiscated were brass knuckles, tear gas, and a dagger. Some lawyers and judges saw what was going on and simply declined to enter until the inspection was over....

Charles Gordone’s Pulitzer winner hasn’t lost an ounce of intensity in 33 years. James Bagnall revives Stage Actors Ensemble’s 1994 staging (directed by David A. Mason), turning up the heat on the saga of Johnny Williams, a Chicago pimp and would-be gangster who blows his chance to escape the hate-driven death trip he’s been on all his life. Stephan Turner repeats his riveting portrayal of doomed, misogynistic hard-ass Johnny, a man so obsessed with white folks he can’t tell who his friends are....

Apocalypse Now Redux With Martin Sheen, Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall, Frederic Forrest, Albert Hall, Sam Bottoms, Laurence Fishburne, Dennis Hopper, G.D. Spradlin, Harrison Ford, Colleen Camp, Cynthia Wood, Christian Marquand, and Aurore Clement. Still, to imply that this movie’s highly entertaining obfuscations of American and Southeast Asian history have more value than anything filmmakers could possibly tell us today is to place a pretty low premium on the truth, the world, and the present–not to mention movies and ourselves....

For eight years the Chicago The inspiration for CYSF came from Ron Chez, Sheldon’s brother, who went to Niles Township High School in the mid-1950s. “I was a dismal student,” he says. “I had no intention of going to college, and I got into my share of trouble–fights and things. I was not a pleasant person. About the only reason I stayed in school at all was because of sports–baseball, wrestling, and football–and my coaches....

The linchpins in Peter Wegner’s current exhibition are conceptual riffs on the relationship between color and name. 42 Unnamed Blues is exactly that–a large sheet of identical rectangles, each painted a different shade of blue. The rich hues stir the emotions, which tempts you to try to label the colors, to translate their mysterious power into words. The futility of such efforts is illuminated by 1 and 9 Yellows, a gigantic paint chip on which nine luminous yellows are set next to a jumble of trite names such as “deep yellow” and “vivid yellow....

Dear readers: As promised, this week’s column is packed with letters from straight guys who don’t want to suck dick. Enjoy. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’m writing because I need your help. My girlfriend and I broke up three months ago. Since then I cannot stop thinking of her. I’ve written letters and tried phoning. She hates me and now thinks I’m stalking her....