Late last month the New York Times published a piece on the rise of “NPR Voice,” a peculiar speech pattern that’s ballooned on the radio and podcasts and is characterized by an informal and slightly conversational style. Writing about its pregnant pauses and colloquialisms, Teddy Wayne noted the curious nature of a style of radio storytelling that’s meant to appear authentically casual: “The irony is that such presentations are highly rehearsed, with each caesura calculated and every syllable stressed in advance....

One reigning camp queen remembers and pays homage to another in Hell in a Handbag’s production of The Artificial Jungle, the final play written by Charles Ludlam, the patron saint of queer comedy, before his early death in 1987. A la Double Indemnity, a hunky drifter (David Lipschutz) colludes with a stir-crazy pet-shop clerk (Sydney Genco, in fabulous female drag) to commit insurance fraud, murder her simpleton husband (Ed Jones), and escape the control of the family business’s high-haired matriarch (David Cerda, naturally)....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Monday, January 23, 2016. Why some Chicagoans are disappointed that “Public Enemy No. 1” El Chapo was extradited to New York El Chapo Guzmán was the first person since Al Capone to be named “Public Enemy No. 1” by the Chicago Crime Commission. Guzmán’s Sinaloa cartel allegedly wrecked havoc on the streets by “brutally dominating Chicago’s booming narcotics trade—a market that has been linked to the city’s problems of gangs and shootings” and by using the city a distribution center for drugs, according to the New York Times....

Be careful not to capture any of the entertainers in the shot when you’re Instagramming your steak at this slick strip joint in west-suburban Stone Park. Rocco, Allure’s greeter (of course that’s his name), won’t like it. Owner Bob Itzkow—who’s perhaps best known for opening his strip club next door to a convent—tapped venerable North Shore fine-dining chef Michael Lachowicz to design a full restaurant kitchen and train the staff to implement his menu, which leans toward standard steak-house meat and potatoes rather than the formal French style Lachowicz is known for....

Chicago guitarist James Elkington has played in so many bands and collaborated with so many musicians that it can be difficult to keep track of everything. He remains best known for leading a sophisticated pop band called the Zincs, which split up not long after releasing its third album, Black Pompadour, in 2007. In 2004 he and singer Janet Bean (Freakwater, Eleventh Dream Day) launched a duo called the Horse’s Ha, which put out its second and final record, Waterdrawn, in 2013....

In an unnamed midwestern city sometime in the early 90s, an elderly white woman lives out her days entirely through her television, while a young black woman struggles to get by in a faltering economy. Their stories echo and intertwine in The End of TV, Manual Cinema’s transfixing new multimedia show, which is receiving its Chicago premiere at the Chopin Theatre. It’s a beautiful thing to look at and listen to, with enough real empathy for our country’s living conditions to give it contemporary resonance....

Jonathan Demme, who directed the new screen adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s The Master Builder, is 70 years old, with a filmography that includes such notable features as Melvin and Howard (1980), Stop Making Sense (1984), The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Philadelphia (1993), and Rachel Getting Married (2008). Seventy-year-old Wallace Shawn, who stars as Ibsen’s protagonist and scripted the film from his own translation of the play, has an acting resumé as long as your arm, dotted with such beloved movies as Manhattan (1979), The Princess Bride (1987), and Toy Story (1995)....

Brooklyn’s Ben Greenberg is always busy making new music, and everything he keeps himself busy with is usually great. Currently playing in punishing industrial noise-rock duo Uniform, Greenberg’s explored weird sounds from all over the place, having also done time in alt-rock outfit the Men, noise-punk trio Pygmy Shrews, and free-jazz weirdos Zs. This week he released the demo for yet another endeavor, Beat Depression. These six songs are supermelodic, punk-leaning rock, with some tracks raging on a double-time stomp and others laying back with acoustic guitar and mellow rhythms....

I’ve written here about my grandma Goldberg before. She was the family aphorist who used to say “Marry a Christian, one day she’ll wake up and call you ‘dirty Jew.” And “Scratch a goy, you’ll find an anti-Semite.” And of course, “Go to sleep with a young shiksa, wake up with an old goya.” (No, not the Spanish painter. She didn’t know from Spanish painters.) Meanwhile, Nancy’s best friend, Grace, has her own bedtime issues....

Just when I thought the mayor’s race couldn’t get any weirder, into the fray jumps a Daley. If this keeps up, the Tribune may have to rewrite its recent story about how tough it is to run Chicago. If being mayor is so “grueling,” how come so many want to do it? As such, Bill Daley was working for SBC when, in 2001, it sold a company called SecurityLink to GTCR Golder Rauner, a Chicago-based investment firm....

Claire Greenway/Getty Images Frankie Knuckles in 2007—RIP. At its best, disco music combines the extremes of opulence and brute force. It flaunts the ostentatiousness of classical music, some of the musical interplay of jazz, the warmth of soul-music singing, and the rhythmic directness of early R&B and rock; it borrows the best of everything without wearing its complexity or musicianship on its sleeve. Frankie Knuckles emerged out of the New York disco scene of the early-to-mid 70s, but his genius came from his ability to see past disco’s ornamentation and pinpoint its essence—namely, rhythm....

Julia Thiel The Bitter Bourbon Buck, Letherbee Fernet I stopped by Parson’s earlier this week for the launch party of Letherbee’s new fernet—a type of amaro that’s incredibly popular in Argentina (even more so than in Italy, where it originated) but less well known in the United States (outside San Francisco, anyway). Distiller Nathan Ozug says he’s been into Italian bitter liqueurs for a while, and has wanted to make his own version of fernet since he first began working for Letherbee a year and a half ago....

Michael Gebert Rick Bayless presenting at Modern Mexican “What is the relevance of the Mexican pantry in modern cuisine?” asked Rick Bayless of a crowd of about 60 or 70 people assembled lecture-hall-style in front of a test kitchen area at Kendall College on Saturday morning. The chef of Frontera Grill and Topolobampo was leading an all-day session on Mexican cuisine in fine dining called Modern Mexican, or Mod Mex for short, an adjunct event to the upcoming Chicago Gourmet festival in Grant Park at the end of the month....

As a performer, Dael Orlandersmith, who wrote and starred in the Obie-winning 1995 one-person show Beauty’s Daughter, is pure empathic gravitas. Her chopping-block physique, orotund voice, and stately bearing give her a monumental presence, while her uncanny ability to conjure exquisitely damaged and pathetic characters lends a disarming warmth to everything she does. And she captivates through the most modest of means; a slight shift of her head, lowering of her voice, or adjustment of her posture is all she needs to transform convincingly from one persona to another....

Q My friend is in her late 20s and married, and she has two little kids. Her husband had a rough childhood and has some issues. Since their most recent child was conceived, they have not had sex. He says he believes there is a difference between a lover and a mother, and he refuses to have sex with his wife now because he thinks of her as a mother to their children and not as a lover....

When Ibraham Parlak was arrested by Homeland Security in July of 2004 as a Kurdish terrorist who needed to be thrown out of the country, the first Chicago journalist to write about his plight was Mike Sneed. I had something to do with that. Parlak ran a restaurant on the Red Arrow Highway in southwest Michigan and was a popular member of the Harbor Country community. But his application to become a naturalized American set off an alarm....

While the Chicago Humanities Festival celebrates its 25th anniversary with a season that’s all about journeys, artistic director Matti Bunzl is about to embark on a one-way journey of his own. At the end of this year, Bunzl will leave the festival—and the University of Illinois, where he’s spent the last 16 years as a professor of anthropology—to return to his native Austria. It was announced last month that he’s been tapped to be the next head of Vienna’s estimable Wien Museum, the municipal institution of history, art, and culture that he says inspired his career....

Pentagram kicks ass. Controversial opinion here: I would put the best Pentagram tracks up head-to-head with some Sabbath cuts. The legendary metal band—formed in 1971 but thrown onto the mainstream radar with the popular 2012 documentary about singer Bobby Liebling’s dark lifestyle, Last Days Here—bring their doomy boogie to the Abbey tonight, playing with openers Satan’s Satyrs, Electric Citizen, and Mexican Werewolf. Today’s 12 O’Clock Track is one of the band’s heaviest, “All Your Sins,” off of their first official full-length, a self-titled album later reissued in 1993 as Relentless....

On the brand-new Ballin Like I’m Kobe east-side MC G Herbo, formerly known as Lil Herb, repeats the acronym “NLMB.” As he told radio personality and rap reporter Sway Calloway earlier this year NLMB stands for “Never Leave My Brothers,” the 19-year-old rapper’s collective of close friends. NLMB has acted like a shield for the violence that’s responsible for the Terror Town, the stigmal nickname given to a patch of South Shore, Herb’s neighborhood....

About three years ago, Jeff Phillips, a Chicago-based photographer, was browsing through an antique mall outside Saint Louis when he came across a stack of 30 bright yellow boxes filled with Kodachrome slides. The first slide he pulled out was a snapshot of a middle-aged woman, perfectly centered within the frame, wearing a long, frilly pink dress and standing in front of a group of pine trees. The second slide was almost identical to the first, except that the woman was wearing a yellow dress....