In vivid cobalt blue, Julie Green carefully paints a hamburger seasoned with salt and pepper, a stack of onion rings, french fries, cherry limeade, and a big bowl of vanilla ice cream on a white porcelain plate. The crude contour lines illustrate the final meal of death row inmate Paul Everette Woodward. “He told me he was saving room for his last meal,” the warden had told the local paper. “He ate everything except a few fries....

On Saturday evening I opened up Instagram and saw that James Swanberg* of Today’s Hits and the Lemons had commented on my photo of the J-card from the Lemons’ debut, Hello, We’re the Lemons; he’d posted a link to “Corn Dog From the Tastee-Freez,” a song he made for me after I purchased the cassette at Bric-a-Brac Records the previous weekend. The tune is one of a few personalized ditties Swanberg made for people who recently purchased Hello, We’re the Lemons at Bric-a-Brac, a promotion Swanberg thought up a few weeks ago, after the Lemons found out they were close to becoming the Logan Square store’s best-selling artist in any format....

The ghee that chef Marisa Paolillo uses at her five-month-old restaurant Mango Pickle comes from a cow sanctuary in Gujarat where the residents feast on organic sugarcane and retire peacefully to the fields when they stop giving milk. That vision involves almost crystallized spheres of crunchy pani puri filled with cool English-pea puree from which sweet pepper-and-garlic grilled shrimp poke out like the tail of a comma. It’s conjured the smoky charcoal-fired eggplant-tomato dip baingan bharta, here garnished with roasted carrot halves and beet wedges, an arresting adjustment in texture for a typically homogenous dish....

As you may have figured out by now, I have what you might call a—oh—conflicted attitude toward the charter school movement. Over the past few years, Pattillo has focused on school choice. Her research is a constant reminder to people like me: Don’t lose sight of the anxiety that so many ordinary working-class and low-income parents and guardians have about sending their children to high-crime, low-scoring, dead-broke neighborhood schools. Ideally, school choice would mean that all students get to select from schools including expensive private ones such as the U....

Usually our coverage of the Chicago Underground Film Festival ends with a roundup of notable short works playing on various bills—but this year, the last shall be first. Some of the most inventive and exciting stuff at CUFF comes in small packages, so why not give them the attention they deserve? In a way, shorts are even more underground than features because they cost so much less to produce. The only way to be more underground would be not to make a film at all....

After 35 years of profound confounding, it’s a wonder the Melvins have any “firsts” and “never done befores” left. But they claim that the brand-new A Walk With Love & Death (Ipecac) is their only double album to date. That’s a little bit misleading, though. Album one, Death, now, that’s a real Melvins record—from the eerily percolating, almost Pere Ubu-like “Black Heath” to the huge, shrieking barn burner “Euthanasia” to the heavy psych chug of “Edgar the Elephant....

Jerry Williams (formerly known as Little Jerry Williams) has been knocking out bizarre R&B records for 48 years under the name Swamp Dogg. Since his 1970 debut on Canyon, Total Destruction to Your Mind, he’s taken his music down some weird back roads: a black-liberation song with an admitted Ku Klux Klan member on banjo (“Call Me Nigger”), a tender ballad about a man whose son is engaged to a hooker (“Or Forever Hold Your Peace”), and entire albums devoted to country and calypso—Dogg claims his version of John Prine’s “Sam Stone” would have been a hit if only Al Kooper hadn’t released his recording of the track around the same time....

Carolee Schneemann’s Fuses plays in the adults-only portion of this year’s cat-related experimental film program. There are way too many good screenings scheduled for tomorrow night, presenting Chicago cinephiles with their greatest dilemma since, well, last Friday, when there were concurrent revivals of The Ladykillers, Knife in the Water, and Douglas Trumbull’s Brainstorm (the latter screens again tonight, thankfully). The weeklong runs of James Gray’s masterful The Immigrant and Sam Fleischner’s flawed (yet courageous) Stand Clear of the Closing Doors conclude at the Siskel Center and Facets Multimedia, respectively....

When Trina Robbins was around 11 or 12 years old, her mother, a schoolteacher, would bring home reams of paper and lots of number-two pencils. After carefully folding the sheets in half (and diligently gnawing away at the pencils’ erasers) Robbins would draw herself four-page comics. She remembers one that was inspired by her fascination with the “goddess” behind green goddess dressing. “Why,” she remembers her heroine exclaiming upon discovering the goddess’s temple, “she’s green!...

Leading the minimal-electronics vanguard of the early 80s would have required quite the undertaking for Cincinnati’s John Bender had he not instead opted to totally retreat into the recesses of obscurity (read: conventional life) following the release of the three now-mythical LPs on his own Record Sluts imprint. For years he stayed well out past the fringes, not much bothering with the notoriety those records received from the niche community he helped inspire....

Q: I have two female sex partners who want to be breath-play dominated. I know the practice is dangerous, and I employ the rules of consent and communication a pro dom escort friend taught me. But is there a legal release document we could sign that protects consenting adults in the event of an accident or death? —Ruminating About Consensual Kinks “As consenting adults, we assume the risks involved in this type of kink,” said Mistress A Elena....

On March 5, Mayor Rahm Emanuel issued a press release boasting that motorists in Chicago had saved millions of dollars in parking meter fees thanks to the deal he renegotiated last year with the company that owns the meters. In case you’ve tried to forget, it was December 2008 when the City Council, at the urging of former mayor Richard M. Daley, voted to lease the city’s 36,000 parking meters to Chicago Parking Meters Inc....

It’s safe to say that unemployment isn’t Professor Wyndham Lathem’s biggest problem right now. Northwestern University abruptly fired him after he and a chat-room buddy from England allegedly stabbed Lathem’s boyfriend 70 times while carrying out a gory sexual fantasy and then fled across the country, giving rise to a nationwide manhunt. According to prosecutors at a bond hearing last week, Lathem and Warren planned to first murder several others and then themselves in an I-shoot-you-while-you-stab-me grand finale....

It’s hard to talk about guitarist Charlie Hunter without mentioning his customized instruments—he’s long outfitted his guitars with an extra string or two, which he uses like a jazz organist’s foot pedals to add simple bass parts alongside his vamping and soloing. But when I listen to last year’s terrific Everybody Has a Plan Until They Get Punched in the Mouth (Groundup Music), I get so absorbed in the music that I barely remember that, say, the austere blues patterns on “(Looks Like) Someone Got Ahead of Schedule on Their Medication” come from Hunter’s bass strings....

The Neo-Futurists are nothing if not self-reflexive. Creators of Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, a show that bestows aliases on audience members while the actors play themselves, they love building M.C. Escheresque entertainments where every new element is another stairway torquing back on itself, forthrightly announcing its own artifice. The 100-minute Haymaker is a messy, occasionally delightful case in point. When he was 13 years old, Too Much Light contributor Trevor Dawkins wrote Tears of Shanghai, a Raiders of the Lost Ark-inspired screenplay in which fearless hero Russell Dakota takes on a host of gangsters and Nazis while falling for the mysterious Elona Levingston....

Presented by Music Box and the Film Noir Foundation, the sixth annual Noir City: Chicago festival follows one week after the nationwide release of Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez’s much-hyped noir revival Sin City: A Dame to Kill For. Both are devotional acts, dedicated to enlarging the audience for classic film noir, yet their approaches to this mission couldn’t be more different. Sin City is essentially reductive; as I wrote in my capsule review, Miller and Rodriguez “take all the key elements of hard-boiled fiction and boil them down even harder, till there’s nothing left but a crusty residue of vicious thugs, cynical losers, crooked politicians, viperish women, and flying glass as people get punched out and crash through windows....

Q: As a queer man of color—I’m Asian—I feel wounded whenever I am exposed to gay men in New York City, Toronto, or any city where white gay men dominate. Gay men, mostly whites and Asians, reject me because of my race, and no one admits to their sexual racism. I understand that sexual attraction is subconscious for many people. But it is unfair for a gay Asian like myself to be constantly marginalized and rejected....

Narrative opacity collides with emotional brutality in Philip Ridley’s 2011 play, now making its local premiere with the new-to-Chicago Quick + Dirty Productions after a run in Portland, Oregon. A man (David Lind) and a woman (Rebecca Ridenour) trade tales of violence and domination—from rape-by-grenade to castration. Sometimes their stories involve fantastical sea creatures and monkeys. References to a birthday party, a young child (shades of George and Martha from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?...

Is a ten-inch with four versions of Ray Parker Jr.’s Ghostbusters theme (original, instrumental, dance remix, dub) supercool or over-the-top ridiculous? And does it help at all to know that the release commemorates the film’s 30th anniversary and glows in the dark? I couldn’t tell you. But wait, there’s more! For a look at some of the art and science that goes into keeping a record store stocked the other 364 days of the year, see this week’s feature story—Leor Galil writes about tagging along with Permanent Records manager Dave McCune to the Chicagoland Record Collectors Show in Hillside....

Record Store Day returns for its tenth iteration on Saturday, April 22. This year the Reader is spotlighting a half dozen underappreciated neighborhood shops that don’t do much if anything for the occasion, but as usual we’ve also collected these listings about the places that do. Your menu for this year’s Record Store Day If a shop doesn’t appear here, that’s because as far as we know it isn’t doing anything out of the ordinary for Record Store Day....