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This is how it works: in the same way corporations are compelled to grow or die and academics to publish or perish, bands must put out records. It’s not unheard-of for young bands to hit the studio before playing a single show–and if you’re looking to go on tour, another expected goal, it sure helps to have something on plastic. By those standards, Tallulah’s something of a nonentity. With the exception of a street fair near Kankakee, the quintet has never played out of town, and though the three women at its core (all in their mid- to late 30s) have been singing together since 1995, they’re only now releasing their first album, Step Into the Stars....

By Ben Joravsky Over the summer of 2001 Jeff created a Web site that listed local soup kitchens and shelters that needed food, and he and his father hooked up with Plant a Row for the Hungry, a national organization that encourages gardeners to donate some of their produce to the hungry. On September 2 the Grabowskis got a write-up in the Sun-Times headlined “Gardeners donate produce to help feed the hungry....

By Neal Pollack From the seventh floor a woman shouted, “We’re not going anywhere!” Members of the RCYB floated along the fringes, waving their hands, exhorting the crowd to join Moore in her anthem. “This building ain’t closed,” Moore said. He motioned to a worker. “Thanks to the cooperation of residents, elected officials, and community leaders, these families will be safe and warm for winter,” Jackson said. “The savings will be reinvested in our existing properties to improve conditions for all residents....

My roommates Brian and Andy and I had been here having a nice evening. Around midnight we went home and went to bed. Sometime in the middle of the night I heard shuffling down the hallway, and my doorknob rattled like someone was trying to open it. But then it stopped, and the shuffling went back down the hallway. Whoever it was tried Andy’s bedroom door with no luck either. But Brian was awake and thought it was me or Andy, so he opened the door to find an absolutely gorgeous piss-drunk girl who came on to him, wanting to get laid....

The first sign that I’m in a historic house is the straw basket full of powder blue surgical booties by the entrance. I presume they’re for prospective buyers. The Reed house, built in 1931 by architect David Adler, is currently on the market for $26 million, a record price for the Chicago area. Adler, presently the subject of a major exhibit at the Art Institute, is celebrated for his magnificent society homes, and the 24,179-square-foot Lake Forest mansion he designed for Mrs....

On the opposite end of the spectrum from Burn the Floor–a glitzy Broadway show opening this week that panders to the audience in every possible way–is dance with so much integrity it risks boring us. Wayne McGregor, artistic director of the London-based Random Dance Company, takes that risk. Watching his Aeon on tape, I felt I was witnessing a physics demonstration that used the body to illustrate such concepts as the fulcrum and pendulum....

Rising From the Lake of Dracula Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I was pretty bored with a lot of what was going on, and I didn’t really feel like starting another band,” says Magas, lamenting the underground rock scene’s lack of imagination. But then he saw Quintron and Wolf Eyes, two bands with connections to the no-wave scene, using drum machines. “I thought, ‘That’s pretty easy....

I’m a woman in an LTR. Recently I had a discussion about anal sex with my guy. Knowing that I was a little nervous, he was GGG and let me experiment on him first. Well, it worked out great, and we both found pleasure in anal play. However, last time I was fingering him I felt something different than normal. Instead of soft flesh I felt something rough and uneven inside him....

Re: “Ice Queens” by Michael G. Glab [April 20] Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Women’s hockey and women’s sports in general have always had difficulty being taken seriously, and I find it disappointing that the article in the Reader took the route that it did. What began as a great concept for an article (the history of three women in hockey, at different levels, and with different lifestyles) turned into something that I am personally embarrassed to have read....

ALTAN 1/28, IRISH AMERICAN HERITAGE CENTER One of the tightest, most intricate, and best-respected Irish trad ensembles working today, Altan has never added bland New Age touches a la Clannad or invited the Rolling Stones over to jam a la the Chieftains. They still focus more or less unchangingly on the resin that grips the Irish heartstrings: the busy, the sad, the seductive, and the weird. Soprano and fiddler Mairead Ni Mhaonaigh directs the high end since the band’s founder (and her husband), flutist Frank Kennedy, died of bone cancer in 1994....

Broadly speaking, the popular literary biopic is a hopeless subgenre, but this account of the relationship between Sylvia Plath and husband and fellow poet Ted Hughes manages to test the rule thanks to its unusual seriousness and first-rate performances by Gwyneth Paltrow and Daniel Craig. Director Christine Jeffs and writer John Brownlow scrupulously avoid taking sides in the volatile marriage–a delicate task given the four decades of verbal and legal warfare between the couple’s partisans, not to mention the aura of myth that surrounds Plath’s suicide at 30, which brought her a level of recognition she never achieved in life....

I’ve just been rereading Rupert Furneaux’s 1977 book The Tungus Event about the massive explosion that occurred in the Tunguska region of Siberia in 1908. The book does not come to any firm conclusion about the cause, although a meteorite is probably the main suspect. What is the latest thinking on this? I have tried Google but what information there is seems to have been hijacked by the UFO brigade. What caused the explosion?...

A while ago you compared tax rates in the U.S. to those in other developed countries [December 1]. How about doing the same for vacation time? I’ve heard the Germans get so many days off they only have to work four days a week, and I don’t get the impression the French are overexerting themselves either. What’s the straight dope? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You’ve heard about the German work ethic?...

Friday 8 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » TIFT MERRITT A few years ago North Carolina’s Tift Merritt released an unremarkable if solid debut album, Bramble Rose, that stuck to the well-traveled byways of commercial alt-country: Lucinda Williams polished to a 70s Linda Ronstadt sheen. But she’s certainly grabbed my attention with her follow-up, Tambourine (Lost Highway), which sounds like Emmylou Harris doing Dusty in Memphis....

Jorge and Jeannette Gacharna opened BRASA ROJA, an outpost of their excellent Lakeview churrascaria El Llano, this spring, and it has one major advantage over the original: pollo rostizado. Every morning the birds start spinning over hot coals in the window of the Albany Park storefront. Plump and round, with steadily browning skin, they almost beg to be tucked under the arm like a football and carried away for takeout. Right now Brasa Roja has a lock on the local rotisserie trade, but with the rumored arrival of the Mr....

Michael Menendian’s perfectly cast staging of Tennessee Williams’s domestic tragedy for Raven Theatre abounds in discoveries. Nick Keenan’s evocative sound design renders the seedy French Quarter setting painfully audible, and Liz Fletcher makes us taste the insanity in Blanche’s shabby-genteel fantasies. Mike Vieau plays Stanley Kowalski with a territorial brutality rather than the usual smoldering eroticism, and Dominica Wasilewska registers Stella’s anguish: caught between an abusive husband and a prevaricating sister, she’s easily the tale’s greatest victim....

Two nights of pro-American rallies run amok had left police in southwest-suburban Bridgeview reeling. So when Friday rolled around they called in plenty of backup—about 125 officers from 20 surrounding towns, plus the Illinois State Police and the Cook County Sheriff’s Police. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Any newcomer needing a briefing got one from Lieutenant Tim Callahan, who’s been a cop in Bridgeview for 17 years and says that until last week he’d never dealt with an incident of this magnitude....

A cornucopia of films and workshops for children ages 2 through 13, the 21st Chicago International Children’s Film Festival continues Friday, October 22, through Sunday, October 31, at Facets Cinematheque, Burnham Plaza, and the Vittum Theater, 1012 N. Noble. Subtitled films programmed for children under age 11 will feature an actor reading the subtitles live. For more information call 773-281-9075 or visit www.cicff.org, which features a full festival schedule. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

The moral no-man’s-land of illegal immigration in London proves fertile ground for modern noir in this superior suspense film, directed by Stephen Frears (The Grifters) from a screenplay by Steve Knight. A doctor who’s fled Nigeria for political reasons (Chiwetel Ejiofor in a fine performance) is reduced to driving a cab by day and working the front desk of a posh hotel by night; after he discovers a human heart in a hotel-room toilet, his ice-cold Latino boss (Sergi Lopez) uses the promise of a passport to lure him into appalling black-market activities....

As a guy who failed to make it as a stand-up comedian in Los Angeles, returned to Chicago with no job, and now lives with his mother, Mike Preston has a lot he could complain about. But he doesn’t. “Nobody owes you anything,” he likes to say. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Instead the Crystal Lake native and former social worker spends a few hours a week working on his cable-access talk show, Psycho Babble, which airs at 10 PM Tuesdays on AT&T Broadband channels 3 and 38 in the western suburbs....