Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tonight local rapper Psalm One (aka Cristalle Bowen) opens for Doomtree MC Dessa at Millennium Park’s Pritzker Pavilion to close out this year’s Downtown Sound series. Psalm says it’s one of her biggest hometown shows, and it’s an excellent opportunity to catch up on her recent spate of work. At the end of May Psalm released Free Hugs, an EP she describes as a “breath of fresh air”; the project started a couple years ago when producers A Plus and Aagee (aka Compound 7) woke her up in the middle of the night and sent her a pack of beats, and she challenged herself to record a song for every track and ended up releasing Free Hugs under the name Hologram Kizzie....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Brilliant jazz reedist and bandleader Sam Rivers died on December 26, 2011, at the ripe old age of 88, after packing a vast amount of music into his career. His discography may not have been as lengthy as those of some of his peers, but he was a thrilling, prodigious performer right up until his passing; he pushed his ideas through several distinct eras of jazz history, and he always came out at the vanguard....

The bizarre election-day breakdown that made Chicago a worldwide laughingstock started a little after 6 AM on February 5, when Angela Burkhardt went to her polling place in the 42nd precinct of the 49th Ward, a firehouse at 1723 W. Greenleaf. Burkhardt protested that nothing was certain except that the machine had taken the ballot. There was no evidence it had recorded her vote. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Sean Baker’s independent feature Starlet, continuing this week at the Music Box, is constructed around an ingenious plot twist that transforms the movie from a precious character study into something significantly darker. I can’t discuss the movie in any depth without giving the twist away (you might not want to read this until after you’ve seen the movie), and this dilemma points to my frustration with the film. Baker is a confident storyteller and his players (who range from professionals to first-time actors) turn in good, soulful work....

This Sunday evening at the Cultural Center’s Yates Gallery, Chicago Symphony Orchestra cellist Katinka Kleijn will play more than her usual instrument—she’ll be wearing an EPOC Neuroheadset, an electroencephalography (EEG) device whose 14 sensors connect with the scalp and pick up brain waves. Retailing for $299, it’s designed largely for gamers, but Kleijn will use it to give the world premiere of Intelligence in the Human-Machine, a new duet for cello and brain waves composed by Daniel R....

For a horror movie, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) isn’t all that scary. Its climactic sequence—in which Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson), the deranged caretaker of a remote skiing hotel, chases Wendy (Shelley Duvall), his terrified wife, with an ax—was being parodied on late-night TV almost as soon as the movie came out. But there is one moment that never fails to creep me out. It’s when Wendy finds the writing project her husband has been laboring over for weeks and discovers that his typed manuscript, hundreds of pages, contains nothing but endless repetition of the phrase All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mark Kleiman, following up, makes an interesting point: “I think the fact that Bill Ayers, due in large part to his connections with the Chicago economic elite (his father ran the local electric utility), was allowed back into what passes for decent society there reflects badly on the morals of elite Chicagoans.” Generally speaking, I think it’s good for the health of society when former offenders are encouraged to be functioning, law-abiding members of society, so I’m hesitant to agree....

Acting on “the belief that we must talk of war to think of peace,” Forest Park playwright Lisa Rosenthal has launched an initiative, Vet Art Project, to create new art about war. Rosenthal hopes to foster creative partnerships between military veterans and artists in all disciplines, culminating in a public performance at the Chicago Cultural Center’s DCA Theater, 78 E. Washington, on Mon, 2/23/09. VAP is coordinating programs for artists, veterans, and civilian community members over the next few months....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As I crossed the rise at the Fullerton overpass on Lake Shore Drive this morning, Lake Michigan looked calm and Cubbie blue — and how appropriate. The Cubs and their fans have somehow passed into blissful acceptance of the inevitable — it really is going to happen, with the so-called magic number down to a mere 4 — and suddenly are enjoying it all....

thursday22 Thursday22 Miracle ConditionMoullinex, XinobiPhantogram Friday23 Susana BacaPeter Brötzmann & Hamid Drake; Mike Reed’s People, Places & ThingsCéu Anat CohenDrop the Lime Saturday24 Peter Brötzmann & Hamid DrakeAnat CohenStyrenesJozef Van Wissem Tuesday27 JonsiReflection Eternal Wednesday28 JonsiThomas Function MOULLINEX, XINOBI Chances are if you’ve boogied somewhere too dark and too grabby at least once in the past two years, you’ve done so to a track by Xinobi and/or Moullinex—or to something that sounded just like one of them....

Many of the city’s biggest lakefront music festivals have been downsized in the past few years—the jazz and blues fests lost days in Grant Park, and the Celtic, gospel, and Latin fests were relocated to the much smaller Millennium Park—so it’s remarkable that the World Music Festival is ten days long for the first time since its second incarnation back in 2000, and that its lineup has leaped from 60 artists in 2009 to 100 in 2010....

This film screens as part of Reeling: The Chicago LGBT International Film Festival. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Stranger by the Lake, the latest drama from French writer-director Alain Guiraudie, opens with a wide, high-angle shot of a forested parking lot adjacent to an idyllic lakeside. The action is confined to the lake over one sweltering summer, and Guiraudie uses the parking lot throughout the film to note the passing of the season....

A foreclosure lawsuit has been filed against the Chicago Spire’s land owner. Ideas for the hole have been proposed, though I can’t think of anything more resonant than a giant, foreclosed-upon hole. We could try throwing virgins down it, but it probably wouldn’t help. Maybe Alan Greenspan? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Foreclosures generally may end up being the economic issue of the next few months (or longer)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Adapted from a story by Stephan Stefan Zweig, the movie indulges in one of those classic narrative structures you don’t see much anymore: a present-tense story forms the parentheses for a flashback that lasts nearly the entire film and, as it unfolds, powerfully inflects the story framing it. One night in Vienna, around 1900, a graying and rather dissipated concert pianist (Louis Joudan) is dropped off at his flat by two friends, and the dialogue among them reveals that an irate husband has challenged the pianist to a duel the next morning....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I’m not an economist,” 31st Ward alderman Ray Suarez admitted this morning to all who might still have been wondering. Suarez looked alternately lost and impatient during testimony before the City Council’s housing committee by the actual economist in the room, William Strauss of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago—but in fairness, he wasn’t the only one. The committee was gathered to discuss a resolution, already signed by 40 aldermen, calling on Congress to pass legislation helping home owners at risk of foreclosure; Strauss was one of several experts asked to address what many American economists and noneconomists have been claiming for months: the country is experiencing an economic downturn....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At this point, I’ve probably spent thousands of dollars on movie-theater popcorn—and I know full well that’s a ridiculous amount to spend on kernels, oil, and salt. For the amount I spend on a large bag of popcorn at River East 21, I can buy enough of those ingredients at the supermarket to keep me snacking for months. Also, I derive more pleasure from making my own popcorn than having someone else prepare it for me....

One of the most wrenching decisions a journalist must make is whether to write a story someone else has already written. On September 10 Carr dedicated his weekly New York Times column to the crisis at Homicide Watch, the District of Columbia-based website that chronicles each of the district’s homicides. It was an excellent report that made me wince as I read it—but only because I’d been intending to write about Homicide Watch myself....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I decided to take a couple days off from the city and hopped on a train up to Kalamazoo. Anyone looking for an easy way to sum up the plight of the music retailer could have a field day here. When I lived in Kazoo in the mid- to late 90s, the students and indie-scene townies supported several independent record stores, including Flipside and Music Express (where I worked), and there was so little competition between them that Flipside would let Music Express employees cover shifts for its workers if they couldn’t find subs....

Turnoff though it may be to read something described as a postmodern fairy tale, that really is the handiest label for Audrey Niffenegger’s latest, Raven Girl, an illustrated novella about a mixed-species brood. It’s a lovely story. A postman in the electronic era lives on the outskirts of a city—perhaps London. From his house, Niffenegger (Her Fearful Symmetry, The Time Traveler’s Wife) writes, the postman can see “the skyscrapers of the city of which his suburb was the outermost appendage....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I remember seeing this film in a small British Film Institute theater. Michael Powell had set up the screening for me. I was impressed then by its extreme rigor, its strangely luxuriant sobriety, and its great visual beauty. Seeing it again 40 years later is an even stronger experience. The friendly familiarity that I have formed with Powell’s films provides more keys, opens other doors through which the imagination can surge....