WHEN Fri 2/23, 9 PM MORE Velcro Lewis & His 100 Proof Band and Reds and Blue open Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The group has origins in the All-American Anti-War Marching Band, an ensemble of musicians and activists Messing helped assemble in early 2003, just as the U.S. was readying for war. “We had about 80 people,” Messing says. “Maybe a dozen of them were musicians; the rest were activists....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tuesday marks my 15th year at the Reader, but I can’t honestly say this means anything more to me than a convenient hook I can use to get this blog post written, so I can move on to the next task. I miss a lot of people who used to work here, but otherwise I have few fond feelings for the Reader‘s illustrious past....

Even when we hate it. I was in New Orleans over Christmas and I didn’t hear about Katrina. I heard about Katrina and Rita and Ike and Gustav and Betsy and Camille. Betsy was the earliest, 1965. Some say the worst. New Orleans is still cleaning up from Katrina. But because it has survived one hurricane after another, New Orleans not only can look itself in the eye but likes to....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » People who don’t like tattoos often ask people who have tattoos, “Do you know what that’s going to look like when you’re 80?” Ignoring the subtle, mean-spirited passive aggression of the question, I probably agree: yeah, they’re almost definitely going to look terrible. The first tattoo I ever got—a cartoonish fairy/angel/devil girl from a sketch by the front man of the Canadian indie rock group Eric’s Trip that I was obsessed with throughout my teens—is 17 years old, which is almost as old as I was when I got it, and the delicate shading meant to evoke pencil on paper that looked so incredible and lifelike when it was new it has already faded, the lines blending together into a slightly blurry blue-black mass....

Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation Directed by Chris Strompolos and Eric Zala. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But when you see Raiders again, after the initial rush of adrenaline has worn off, it turns out to be as dreary and creaky as a roller coaster in winter. That aching black hole in the center of the screen is Harrison Ford’s take on Indiana Jones: not a character, barely a set of attitudes, really nothing more than a hat, a bullwhip, and a smirk....

Bertolt Brecht wrote his one-act The Wedding in 1919, the same year he joined the Independent Social Democratic Party—the leading faction behind the Bavarian Soviet Republic, which lasted all of a month. Although Brecht’s infatuation with Bavarian-style communism was short-lived—and what reasonable person could support a regime that declared war on Switzerland?—his earliest plays twitch with the revolutionary spirit that filled the air in his homeland. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Lots of us, including me, try to tidy up the great house of Art. We walk into one of its rooms and start sweeping, dusting, and straightening, looking for allusions and patterns and, ultimately, meaning. When that impulse is stymied, arts consumers often exact a quick revenge. “My three-year-old could have painted that.” Or “I don’t get it”—the preferred response to dance. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Pales drops viewers into an ongoing story introduced at “intermission” by Meyer’s “lecture....

For the fifth year, National Pastime Theater devotes a month of events to the unclothed human body. Naked July 2013: Art Stripped Down, which features opportunities for audience participation as well as more traditional performance pieces, comprises four main parts: Using bodies as a canvas and light as a medium—and set to music—The Living Canvas: For the People! tells stories by projecting images onto nude human forms. Tickets to the show also buy a movement workshop (6/29-7/20: workshop Sat 10 AM-1 PM and 2-5 PM, performance Sat 10 PM)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bill Buford serves up another Big Gulp of a bio (9,000+ words) in this week’s issue of the New Yorker, a seriously juicy, all-access-pass profile of chef Gordon Ramsay. Buford tells readers what was going on behind the scenes after Ramsay’s New York restaurant opened, during the long “silence” up until the Bruni review in the New York Times, and after....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Romenesko reported yesterday that the Hearst Connecticut Media Group has banned from its comment boards the use of the word fracking, which sometimes refers to a hydraulic-fracturing process by which petroleum and natural gas are extracted from rocks beneath the earth’s surface. Fracking is objectionable for a number of reasons, not least its effects on the environment (and on the flammability levels of the water at nearby residences), but Hearst found it uncomfortable for reasons as follows: “Sadly, many of our users attempt to exploit a perfectly legitimate word as a replacement for it’s more vulgar cousin,” wrote Brett Mickelson, the executive producer of the Hearst Connecticut Media Group, employing what’s known in the trade as the “vulgar apostrophe” (like its cousin the normal apostrophe, only wrong)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The symposium was effectively organized by my friend Quintin (see photo) so that the six presentations over three days had a logical flow and development: two rather pessimistic analyses of the way film festivals operate, including Mar del Plata, by Peter van Bueren from Amsterdam and Mark Peranson from Vancouver (whose papers I briefly summarized in former posts); two looks at contemporary trends in films by Emmanuel Burdeau from Paris (who emphasized themes of globalization in films by Abbas Kiarostami, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Jia Zhangke, among others) and Cristina Nord from Berlin (who offered fascinating comparisons between new Argentinean cinema and new German cinema, both strengthened as well as hampered by the task of coping with a dark political past); and on the final day, two rather optimistic analyses of contemporary cinephilia by Alvaro Arroba from Madrid and myself....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Late last year New World Records issued a fascinating document of the work of the League of Automatic Music Composers, a Bay Area group that in the late 70s and early 80s became one of the first to use computers as real-time musical instruments. Few people have ever heard the brazenly experimental material produced by the LAMC–a group of largely self-taught tech geeks that included John Bischoff (pictured), Jim Horton, and Tim Perkis–but their canny exploitation of early microcomputers like the KIM-1 (which went for around $250 when it was introduced in 1976 and operated with a mere 1 K of user RAM) presaged whole worlds of music making that would open up in the decades to come....

Ever see a street person whooping it up on the sidewalk, looking like he was dressed by magpies, and wonder for a second if he’s got it right and everything you know is wrong? That’s the feeling I get whenever I meet this industrious New Orleans couple. Quintron’s a man-child scalawag, cranking out dinky roller-rink ditties, haunted-castle overtures, rumbling Swamp Thing grooves, and revivalist gospel on his customized organ, howling like a Delta blues version of Steve Perry and accompanying himself with his patented Drum Buddy....

By the time Sebadoh finally disbanded in 2000, it seemed to have thoroughly run its course: nothing released in later years had the fertile, eccentric energy of Bubble and Scrape, much less Weed Forestin (which I’ve always misread as Weed Foreskin and probably always will). But Lou Barlow and Jason Loewenstein just don’t know how to quit each other, and by 2004 they were back at it again, an acoustic duo playing their greatest hits accompanied by a boom box....

In its November 19 issue the Onion replaced its usual assortment of short music reviews with a rare piece of long-form criticism, giving Chuck Klosterman nearly 1,700 words to talk about Guns n’ Roses’—or more truthfully Axl Rose’s—long-awaited Chinese Democracy. Klosterman delivers this pronouncement almost as an aside, then moves on—as though he realizes he won’t be able to support it or explain it. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I hate Lollapalooza so much. I hate the ugly-ass CTA ads I have to look at for months before the actual festival, and I hate how the organizers have gone out of their way over the years to make it more and more difficult and physically demanding and slightly insulting for members of the press who are trying to do their jobs and cover the cursed thing (not to mention the poor bastards who actually paid money to be there)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On the other hand, having just seen Barack Obama deliver a masterpiece in all respects–style, structure, delivery, and strategy–it was bracing to feel the awesome power of great oratory. As someone who cares very deeply about the power of words across all media and who thinks in my darkest moments that the art of sustained, sophisticated prose is past us, watching and realizing that rhetoric qua rhetoric can change the course of history on its own, realizing this as it is happening, is a rare experience....

Before Chance the Rapper took the stage for the first of two headlining shows at the Riviera two weeks ago, Kyle Laroy Taylor—aka K-Town MC Stunt Taylor—made an unannounced appearance in front of the sold-out crowd. Joined by his cousin Daryon Simmons, who is better known as bop king Dlow, Taylor quickly launched into “Fe Fe on the Block,” a party track that has the kind of sprightly, radiant synths that are so prominent in many rap tracks made for bopping, the playful, intuitive dance that’s blossoming throughout Chicago’s west and south sides....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Yesterday Seattle’s Light in the Attic label released The Evil One, a sterling 15-track album that compiles the tracks Texas psych-rock legend Roky Erickson recorded in the late 70s and released on a pair of overlapping records for CBS in the UK (in 1980) and 415 Records in the U.S. (in 1981). The 48-page CD booklet includes an epic essay from Joe Nick Patoski detailing Erickson’s early days leading the 13th Floor Elevators, his arrest for possessing a single joint in 1969, and his subsequent insanity plea, which left him in a Texas mental institution where he was given electroshock therapy and sedated with Thorazine....

During the Chicago Symphony Orchestra‘s October visit to Mexico City, music director Riccardo Muti was seen having lunch in the hotel lobby with French horn player Dale Clevenger, the leader of the orchestra’s horn section. That they shared lunch was interesting; that they shared it publicly was significant. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » December 2011 brought another mixed review. “Clevenger fumbled his entrance in the slow movement but redeemed himself in the finale,” von Rhein observed....