Longtime Chicago blues fans might remember Alex “Easy Baby” Randle from the Rat Trap at Cermak and Keeler, where he led a raucous house band in the 70s. Randle had been working regularly in Chicago–playing harmonica and drums on the south and west sides–since the late 50s, shortly after he moved here from his native Memphis. As the scene contracted during the 60s and 70s, he soldiered on in joints like Kim’s Lounge (at Oak and Franklin) and the Rat Trap, where producer Steve Wisner first heard him in the mid-70s....

Bardo Pond’s album titles are quick to promise the listener a trippy good time–Bufo Alvarius is named for a toad that secretes a hallucinogenic venom, Amanita for a genus of mushroom. I’m especially partial to their overlooked 2001 release Dilate, which adds a few cantering folk-rock outings to the Philly quintet’s trademark compositions of dense, sludgy riffs, gliding vocal and flute melodies, and spacey feedback extrapolation. But for mind-altering power none of the discs can match the live show, where the band gives in to its improvisational impulses and rides those riffs out into unpredictable, endlessly unfurling tangents....

Bembeya Jazz formed back in 1961 in Beyla, a small village in southeastern Guinea. Having grown extremely popular throughout the country, in 1965 it became one of the first bands to receive state sponsorship under president Sekou Toure. The following year the group relocated to Conakry, the nation’s capital, where it played up to six nights a week, developing a sound based on a three-guitar lineup that generated cyclical, buoyant grooves and gently rolling harmonies....

Chuck Barris’s fanciful 1984 autobiography has been kicking around Hollywood almost as long as Barris was kicking around network television, and George Clooney has finally brought it to the screen as his directing debut. Written by Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation), it charts the rise of a young man on the make (Sam Rockwell in a knockout performance) from the early 60s, when Barris wrote the Freddy Cannon hit “Palisades Park,” to the late 60s, when he created The Dating Game and The Newlywed Game, and through the 70s, when his freak talent contest The Gong Show was cited as evidence that television had hit rock bottom (little did they know)....

September 11. The phone had been ringing all morning as friends and family checked in, commiserating. Ralph had been one of the first. A transplanted New Yorker, he’d quickly reported that everyone he knew there was all right, “thank God.” Now, later the same morning, he was calling back. His voice, full of a melodrama not unusual for him, was weighted with an extra dollop of emotion. “Do you know what they’ve done?...

The easygoing eclecticism of Jolie Holland’s much-praised 2003 debut, Catalpa, made it a shot in the arm to a folk scene that can always use one. It was seemingly the work of a talented young woman operating a four-track amid a pile of scratchy old vinyl–Billie Holiday albums, Nico albums, Smithsonian Folkways LPs, original Broadway cast recordings–strewn about for quick reference. But to listeners willing to make a distinction between poor audio quality and authenticity, Catalpa sounded like what it was: an appealing collection of demos that could still have used some fleshing out....

Keith Fullerton Whitman plays here as part of Adventures in Modern Music, a five-night festival curated by British music magazine the Wire and the Empty Bottle, and he’s nothing if not adventurous. Under the name Hrvatski (the Croatian word for “Croatian”) he’s used hectic, distorted breakbeats to rivet together Game Boy themes, processed birdsong, and the occasional prog-rock cover tune. Under his own name he’s released a stack of records in the past few years, and though they’re relatively subdued they’re even more ambitious, applying modern technologies to the aesthetic questions confronted by his forebears....

In the summer of 1972, a girl from Lawrenceville named Dotty Kavenaugh disappeared. She was eight years old, and on a Monday evening toward the end of June she’d left home on her bicycle to return some overdue books to the public library. Her bicycle was found on a corner across from the courthouse where, a witness said later, she had been talking to a man in a pickup truck. The truck was a 1953 Chevrolet, white with a black grille and a homemade camper on the back....

Lead Stories Gary A. Wysong, 39, was arrested in January in the electronics department of a Meijer store in Middletown, Ohio, and charged with obscenity. According to police, Wysong popped his own hard-core pornography tape into one of the VCRs and watched it for about five minutes before security officers, seeing that he was making other customers nervous, asked him to stop. When he ignored their request, they summoned the police....

I used to live just around the corner from here. Back when I dated more often–before I was in my dotage–people were always trying to fix me up, and so I suffered through a lot of blind dates. I struck upon the idea of coming here. If the date was going badly I could break it off, feigning one of my sick headaches, and head for home in time to catch the Golden Girls marathon....

Noises Off Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Maybe the administrators were spooked by the show’s catalog essay, written by Christoph Cox. It describes Burns’s piece as humorous but also “alarming,” drawing from the verbal “ejaculations” of the fashion photographer, transforming “dictatorial commands” into “a disembodied sonic superego” that “barks orders at passers-by.” It also mentions Michelangelo Antonioni’s hard-partying 1966 freak-out film Blowup as an inspiration....

Tiffany Holmes had never considered herself squeamish–she’d been a premed student at Williams College before switching her major to art history–but a few years ago she came face-to-face with a fat mouse that had been living it up behind her stove. “I immediately sprinted to a chair,” she says. “At that moment, I joined the ranks of hundreds of females who have been stereotyped by Western society as mice-o-phobic.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

The 14th annual Polish Film Festival in America, produced by the Society for Arts, runs Saturday, November 2, through Saturday, November 30. Screenings this week are at the Copernicus Center, 5216 W. Lawrence, and unless otherwise noted, tickets are $9. Passes, available for $40 (five screenings) and $80 (twelve screenings), are good for all programs except the 7:30 screening on Saturday, November 2, and the 3:00 screening on Sunday, November 10; for more information call 773-486-9612....

Take your cloying holiday tunes and pathological mass-shopping frenzies and shove ’em up your reindeer’s keister. To me, the descent of cold, snow, and long dark nights in the limbo between Samhain and winter solstice (not to mention that bracing shot of postelection nihilism) can mean only one thing: it’s Norwegian black metal season! Satyricon’s Volcano (Eaturmusic/Red Ink/Columbia), released in April, is the band’s first U.S. major-label release, and they’re making their second trip to the States for a “Return of the Antichrist” tour....

Two weeks ago I responded to a letter from Fifteen and Gay, a closeted gay high school sophomore who longed to be “some dude’s sex slave.” FAG met a 38-year-old “really nice guy” on the Internet who offered to pick him up from school and take him back to his house. I advised FAG not to go, for all the obvious safety reasons. I also invited readers to weigh in on two issues: How can young kinky folks tell good kinky people from bad kinky people?...

ALTAN 4/20, OLD TOWN SCHOOL This veteran band is considered by many to be the cream of the Irish-traditional crop, and with good reason–Mairead Ni Mhaonaigh’s voice skitters like a seagull over waves of clean, clear, but ornate instrumentation, emphasis on the fiddles and pipes. And there’s nobody on the mainstream world-music scene who gives eerie Irish fairy tales more of a shiver than she does. The group’s ninth album, The Blue Idol (Virgin/Narada), is almost excessively exquisite: to my ears, the delicacy and brittle beauty of their song patterns starts to sound a little lace-curtain after a while....

Rock, Pop, etc. LARRY O. DEAN WITH CHAD GIFFORD & DEREK WALVOORD Free in-store performance. Sat 1/27, 7:30 PM, Starbucks Coffee, 210 W. North. 312-867-0186. FOREVER PLAID SING-ALONG Audience members are invited to sing along during a performance of the musical Forever Plaid. Sun 2/4, 7 PM, Royal George Theatre Center, 1641 N. Halsted. 312-988-9000 or 312-902-1500. KID ROCK, FUEL, BUCKCHERRY Fri 2/2, 7:30 PM, Allstate Arena, 6920 Mannheim, Rosemont. 847-635-6601 or 312-559-1212....

To whom it may concern: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The article states, “Tributary started in 1996 as a collaboration with [Dan] Sutherland, Jeff Economy, and Darren Hacker, but that partnership soon dissolved.” Margasak has an unusual way of defining “soon.” Shooting on …An Incredible Simulation (not Tributary) commenced in 1996, and the four of us worked on the film as a collective until late 1998....

Some of the eight stories in ZZ Packer’s debut collection, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere (Riverhead), feature ambitious young African-Americans looking to improve their lives: in “Our Lady of Peace” idealistic Lynnea moves from rural Kentucky to Baltimore to teach inner-city kids; in “Geese” Dina travels to Tokyo “in the hopes of making a pile of money.” Both wind up sorely disillusioned–which in itself is a welcome change from the glut of feel-good empowerment fiction out these days....

Brooklyn’s Antonio Hardy, aka Big Daddy Kane, would be remembered as one of hip-hop’s greatest lyricists even if he’d never opened his mouth: he cowrote a number of classic hits in the 80s for artists such as Biz Markie (“Make the Music With Your Mouth, Biz”) and Roxanne Shante (“Roxanne’s Revenge”). But he also turned out to be a fierce MC in his own right. As the first two-thirds of Rhino’s 2001 collection The Very Best of Big Daddy Kane shows, Kane strung together an unremitting series of hits in the late 80s–“Raw,” “Ain’t No Half Steppin’,” “Smooth Operator,” “Warm It Up, Kane”–that are as sharp as any in hip-hop....