Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For a new blog series, I’ll be taking a weekly look at the pop charts. Pop music is a very strange and exciting place to be right now. While the Hot 100 still has its share of oppressively bland rock and tepid R&B, the crumbling of genre boundaries and vastly easier access to new music compared to pre-Internet times has brought formerly esoteric sounds such as dubstep and indie rock into the mainstream and has allowed anarchic weirdos like Nicki Minaj and Diplo to cavort up the charts....

Given how much Steve Krakow, aka Plastic Crimewave, contributes to the Chicago music scene, it’s nice to see the scene give back–in this case, by finally making his quixotic dream of leading a psychedelic guitar army come true. (Krakow says he tried nearly ten years ago at Roby’s, but the show was canceled.) Last month, in an e-mail calling for participants in the PLASTIC CRIMEWAVE VISION CELESTIAL GUITARKESTRA, he explained that he intends the performance to be a “sonic exorcism on the evil that rules this land in the key of the almighty E....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The first thing I noticed is that almost every piece is wall-to-wall sound. On “Nothing Changes,” recorded with cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm and analog synth player Jim Schoenecker, and “The Only Constant Thing Is Change,” made with local experimental icon Dan Burke (Illusion of Safety), Mueller lays down pummeling blastbeats that eventually start to feel like white noise; some of the other tracks achieve a similar density with hydroplaning cymbal washes and bowed metal (or at least that’s what I think it is–you can never be too certain of the technique when Mueller’s involved)....

Mick Dumke A vacant home around the corner from John Cook elementary school, one of six in the Auburn-Gresham neighborhood that could be closed The cost-benefit analysis of closing schools isn’t always clear from the vantage point of Auburn-Gresham. It’s a working-class neighborhood with sturdy bungalows and deeply invested residents, including cops and other city workers, many of whom have lived there for decades. But 79th Street and the surrounding residential blocks are dotted with vacant board-ups, a reminder that resources have left the community and a threat that more could follow....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For most of the last year I spent working at a day center for developmentally disabled adults on the northwest side, I provided one-on-one supervision for a man who was both severely retarded and autistic. Daryl (as I’ll call him here) required direct supervision because, as I learned when I first joined the staff, he was a “runner.” Whenever he was overwhelmed by the goings-on of the center—which was often—Daryl would run out of whatever room he was in....

Ken Ortiz has more work than he can handle. As the only certified deconstructionist in the midwest, he’d like nothing better than to train some competitors. The house had been gutted and then some. Gone were the appliances, cabinets, trim, doors, and the never-sanded three-quarter-inch red oak tongue-and-groove flooring. (“We saved 95 percent of it,” says Ortiz.) An orderly forest of upright rough-cut two-by-fours remained to hold up the structure and define where the rooms had been....

friday20 cLUCKY 7S See Friday. a 9 PM, Velvet Lounge, 67 E. Cermak, 312-791-9050, $10. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » THE SLOW POISONER Andrew Goldfarb of San Francisco once led a band called the Slow Poisoners, but gradually it dwindled: now Goldfarb writes his creepy-kooky-mysterious-and-spooky songs, sings, plays guitar and drums (often at the same time), and picks out his country-gothic mad-preacher outfits all by himself....

GARAGE | Miles Raymer Alex and Francis recruited Medearis to contribute vocals and 12-string electric guitar, and the new trio, calling itself Righteous Love, recorded three songs that combine the kind of fuzzed-out garage pop that the Whites and Medearis usually play with elements pulled straight from vintage gospel albums. The churchy part of their sound might surprise you, but it’s not actually a left turn for the musicians. “Me and Alex used to be in that band Headspacer together a few years ago,” says Medearis....

Last week Mayor Daley and Mara Georges, the city’s corporation counsel, announced at a press conference that the city was adding several new features to its Web site to improve the “transparency” of Chicago government. “That’s the kind of government the residents of Chicago want, and it’s the kind of government that I want,” Daley said. Georges and Daley told reporters that posting the FOIA information online was a response to mandates of the state’s newly toughened FOIA law that went into effect at the beginning of the year....

The cozy confines of Dead End Drive-In As one of its late-night offerings, the Logan Theater is screening Philip Kaufman’s remake of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. In his capsule review, Dave Kehr considers the film inferior to its predecessor, writing, “Where Siegel was swift, compact, and efficient Kaufman tends to be slow, garrulous, and needlessly baroque.” I don’t necessarily disagree with Kehr’s assertion—Siegel was indeed a very economic director, perhaps his greatest virtue—but I think his characterization of Kaufman is somewhat off point....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This was Section 526, a single paragraph in an 822-page bill: “No federal agency shall enter into a contract for procurement of an alternative or synthetic fuel, including a fuel produced from nonconventional petroleum sources, for any mobility-related use, other than for research or testing, unless the contract specifies that the lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions associated with the production and combustion of the fuel supplied under the contract must, on an ongoing basis, be less than or equal to such emissions from the equivalent conventional fuel produced from conventional petroleum sources....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I feel bad for him,” Medrano said. “I don’t think he likes the fact that people in the ward still have the tendency to come to me with problems.” Medrano was the ward’s alderman until 1996, when he was caught up in the Silver Shovel corruption probe, convicted of extortion, and sent to a federal prison for nearly two years....

As the clock struck five on a recent Friday, patrons began to bounce through the doors at the Bar Louie in Dearborn Station. First two, then five, then a boisterous group ten strong and looking barely legal. Laughter erupted from a quartet of African-American women in business casual. Two young Latinos worked laptops at a two-top by the bar, where a lone white guy in a painter’s cap nursed a Corona and watched the Blackhawks game flash across a bank of TVs....

QI’m a 26-year-old straight female. I’m writing because I need to ask someone what to think right now. I just fucked a guy while on holiday in Costa Rica. I thought I was sex-positive and adventurous, so why do I feel so ashamed? I’m dating a boy back in the U.S. whom I absolutely adore, but we’re not necessarily exclusive. The guy was a 22-year-old local—I thought he was so sweet....

Scott Short Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Actually, Short is painting from copies of copies. He xeroxes a sheet (whose original color gives each work its parenthetical title), then xeroxes the xerox, then xeroxes that xerox, up to as many as 400 times, to produce what he calls “blooms” of tiny black marks. He selects a copy he likes, then projects a slide of it onto a canvas and traces the marks with black paint, a painstaking process that can take hundreds of hours....

There’s that moment on the third or fourth date when a certain comfort level finally sets in—enough to order dishes or drinks with the intention of splitting them. A big step in the relationship, really. The problem arises, however, when your dinner partner orders a drink like Masa Azul’s Heart of the Dead—a florid, sweet concoction fronted by sotol blanco and complemented by passion fruit, pomegranate, limonada, Hum liqueur, and blood orange....

Three weeks ago I wrote about the Committee on Buildings meeting that aldermen Bernard Stone and Ray Suarez held on December 7–just the two of them. This had seemed like a pretty thin crowd for conducting official legislative business, and after the meeting was over I asked Stone, the committee chairman, what constituted a quorum, the minimum number of people needed to hold a meeting. He said it didn’t matter, because the 14-member committee didn’t technically need a quorum to hold a meeting....

Back in the fun-filled early days of the teachers’ strike—before Mayor Emanuel brought in his lawyers and everyone decided to go back to school—it was still possible to get a laugh or two out of the comments of some of our local politicians. Like First Ward alderman Joe Moreno, who on September 10 went on Fox News to discuss public education—god help us all. Well, in the aftermath of Sunday’s union meeting and Tuesday’s decision to end the strike, I think it’s time to give everyone—starting with Alderman Moreno—a little lesson about the politics of the Chicago Teachers Union....

Few musicians mix traditional song forms with contemporary sounds better than Helder Aragao, aka DJ Dolores. A native of Recife in Brazil’s musically rich northeast, he has a deep understanding of the regional styles he incorporates on his most recent album, Aparelhagem (Crammed Discs, 2005). The spontaneous rhythms and cadences of embolada, an improvised form akin to rap, are surrounded by wiggy postsurf guitar, slinky trombone, and booming electronic beats on “De Dar Do,” while the sentimental working-class pop form known as brega is wedded to houselike grooves on “Sanidade....

The 14th European Union Film Festival runs Friday, March 4, through Thursday, March 31, at Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, 312-846-2800. Tickets are $10, $7 for students, and $5 for Film Center members. Following are selected films screening through Thursday, March 10; for a full schedule see siskelfilmcenter.com. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Amer This French-Belgian feature (2009) pays tribute to the Italian giallo, a flashy horror genre of the 60s and 70s whose breast-and-blade fetish helped birth the American slasher film....