Rachel Brown was sitting in her New York University dorm room last week when she decided to make a Facebook event for a party—a resignation party for Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel and Cook County state’s attorney Anita Alvarez. It was a joke, she said. But Brown says she never expected her virtual resignation party to “become a physical thing,” adding that making fake Facebook events and memes are a humorous pastime for her....

What’s long made this Elmhurst-bred fivesome so kinetic is that hidden within plain sight of their arena-ready garage-loyal melodies and Mario Cuomo’s cheeky, apathetic sneer is the capability or, well, desire to drunkenly toe the blurry line between proper, showman-focused rock band and degenerate, fuck-shit-up rock band. In short, the Orwells always seem to be considering whether or not to upper-deck the house party’s only working toilet. Their new Terrible Human Beings (Atlantic) plays to that tendency both in title and song, as tracks like “They Put the Body in the Bayou”—complete with that sweet undercurrent of shoegaze sustain—and “M....

Despite its profound and ongoing influence across a wide spectrum of musicians, the work of composer Morton Feldman is rarely performed in Chicago. That dearth can be explained in part by the durational intensity of many of his greatest works—which often clock in at more than an hour, and demand intense concentration and focus from its players. Pianists Christopher Narloch and Jonathan Hannau have been making their presence increasingly felt in Chicago’s new-music community: the former is a successful instructor with a strong grasp of 20th-century repertoire, while the latter splits his time between composing and performing, and both have an abiding love for Feldman....

The Royal Tenenbaums The Grand Budapest Hotel, the newest film by the divisive Wes Anderson, is now playing citywide after premiering in New York and LA last week. J.R. Jones has a review of the film in this week’s paper, in which he writes “over the years Anderson’s cult following has built steadily, though his filmography has had its ups and downs . . . with each new feature his eccentric visual style becomes more pronounced even as his characters seem flatter and more cartoonish....

The new documentary An Honest Living, which screens tomorrow night and again next Thursday at the Siskel Center, is not just a portrait of four individuals, but a love letter to our city’s arts community. Its subjects have pursued their creative interests for years while holding down steady day jobs. At some point, each one admits to wishing they didn’t have to deal with the daily grind—but then, who doesn’t? All of them are happy that they get to make art at all, and it’s this sentiment that dominates the movie....

Casket Girls Happy Monday! It’s cold out again, which is kind of a bummer. Suck it up and head out, though, because there are some great shows to catch during the first half of this week. “Casket Girls, whose core members are sisters Phaedra and Elsa Greene and Ryan Graveface (of Dreamend, Black Moth Super Rainbow, and Graveface Records), not only list ‘David Lynch’ as their sole influence on Facebook but also spread an origin story wherein Graveface serendipitously discovered the sisters sitting beneath a tree in a public square in their mutual hometown of Savannah, Georgia, playing Autoharp and singing,” writes Kevin Warwick....

Theo Parrish If you’re still eager to experience Matisyahu for the novelty of his “Hasidic reggae superstar” persona his Saturday night set at Concord Music Hall could be as ideal as any since his breakout. That’s because Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar, ends at sundown, and Matisyahu will likely drop some timely and perhaps thoughtful banter into his set. That’s hardly the only notable show on Saturday, or for the rest of the week for that matter....

In last year’s Best of Chicago issue we announced the opening of Avondale record store Bric-a-Brac, and this weekend the shop celebrates its first birthday with an all-day party. Late last June, Nick Mayor and Jen Lemasters opened Bric-a-Brac—part record store, part live-music venue, part collectible shop—at the corner of Diversey and Kedzie, and over the past year business has thrived, with inventory growing and in-store shows and parties happening a couple of times a month....

Midwestern Cuisine As I asked local chefs to tell me about a dish from their current menus that they thought was particularly midwestern, it seemed relevant to ask what midwestern food means to them. A lot of the same words and phrases came up in their answers: “simple,” “comforting”—and, overwhelmingly, “meat and potatoes.” All the chefs are also committed to using locally sourced, seasonal ingredients—which makes their jobs just a bit more difficult during Chicago’s long winters....

Grand Comics Database Project Wonder Woman’s first comic-book appearance. It’s a terrible injustice that Wonder Woman has not yet gotten her own superhero movie (let alone franchise), but it’s even worse that a movie has not been made about her creator, William Moulton Marston. The material is right there, presented in entertaining form, in Tim Hanley’s new book, Wonder Woman Unbound: The Curious History of the World’s Most Famous Heroine....

On Saturday and Wednesday the Gene Siskel Film Center is presenting a new restoration of Time to Die, a 1965 Mexican western scripted by not one, but two celebrated novelists, Gabriel García Márquez and Carlos Fuentes. Both men enjoyed long side careers in cinema (they also collaborated on at least one other project, a 1964 feature called The Golden Cockerel), but unfortunately few of the movies they wrote are available on DVD in this country....

Anne Petersen Caramelized bacon with clams casino broth, Michael Jordan’s Steakhouse This weekend marked the sixth annual Baconfest Chicago, and if sold-out attendance at three separate sessions featuring the work of over 160 chefs at the UIC Forum is any evidence, our oft-maligned baconmania has yet to be exhausted. I was a judge at the Friday night session, handing out the Golden Rasher Award for Most Creative Use of Bacon, and, like it is most years, “creative” was a loosely defined term....

OWN Lindsay Lohan lands a role—as herself. A few years ago (more than a few now, I guess) there was a not-terribly-successful show on HBO called The Comeback. On it Lisa Kudrow plays Valerie Cherish, a shrill, washed-up sitcom star who becomes the subject of a reality show that follows her return to television, this time as a wacky, aging aunt figure to a cast of young hotties on a painfully unfunny sitcom....

On the final night of the festival we did gather by the many thousands, on a browning glade ringed by porta-potties, funnel-cake kiosks, and a half-filled Ferris wheel. In the hard darkness that descended from the September gloaming we came to face the last lit stage—twinkle daddies, torch carriers for the pop-punk of yore, and hither and yon the bearers of fading Morton Salt girl and Chesterfield King tattoos. (I suppose a few of us had simply been driven to madness by the wheedlingly saccharine sounds of Paramore or beaten half to a pulp by the food-court rock/rap of supergroup Prophets of Rage....

Just before the 960 Jewish inhabitants of the lofty fortress of Masada committed mass suicide in the year 73, they torched everything within the walls except their food stores, so that the invading Roman legion would know the defenders died willingly and not by starvation. There are all the expected mezes, salads, and kebabs, the latter also available stuffed into wraps for a more hands-on experience. These dishes vary wildly in value and presentation....

Love may be a mirage—the self no better—and what is life but a walking shadow, etc? That seems to be the thesis of The Better Half, cocreated by Julia Rhoads and Leslie Buxbaum Danzig in collaboration with Lucky Plush ensembles present and past. Loosely structured by the Patrick Hamilton play Gas Light, in which a woman marries a murderer keen on stealing jewels hidden in her house, this 2011 work about domestic relationships keeps its Freudian slips not only out in the open but embellished into acrobatic pratfalls that hover between the ease of technique and the risk of improvisation....

Gwynedd Stuart Grilled? There’s a couple called Matt and Clare and they live in Madison, Wisconsin, where they make and distribute small-batch artisan preserves. They have bright-white peppermint smiles and look just as happy as can be gazing out from a framed photo that sits on a shelf at Lincoln Park farm-to-table concept Blue Door Farm Stand, where their sticky-sweet jars of spreadable love are sold alongside other handcrafted food items from the region and beyond....

In 1774, 12 years after he composed a tradition-­busting Italian opera version of the mythical tale of Orpheus and Eurydice, Christoph Willibald Gluck revised it for presentation in Paris. With an eye to French mores and taste, he changed his original casting for the hero who braves hell to reclaim his dead wife from a castrato to a high tenor. He also greatly expanded the dance sequences, which make Orphée et Eurydice an apt selection for a much-­anticipated first collaboration between Lyric Opera and the Joffrey Ballet....

“Mary Purnell prophesied that the ingathering would occur when people drove by the House of David and said, ‘Look, that’s where it used to be.’ With its rubble-strewn grounds and dilapidated buildings, that time would appear to be now. The hard work in which the Israelites have engaged since the beginning of this century is nearing its final goal.” —Adam Langer in “The Last Days of the House of David,” Chicago Reader, June 30, 1994...

Over the back catalog of Axis: Sova—which includes four full-lengths, a handful of singles, and one tape-only release—the local trio unfold a shocking persistence of vision. On their upcoming dispatch, Shampoo You (God? Records), they continue to embrace the freest moments of Brett Sova thrumming guitar discord, and set them within a sturdier rock scaffolding than ever before. While aspects of the spacey, 12-minute title track from 2012’s Weight of Color are still present, more tuneful early gambits, such as the classic-rock-imbued “Raising Hell,” from the same album, now seem like woodshedding for Shampoo You....