Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The last time we heard from El-P he was messing around with new technology that let him legally (or at least apparently legally) throw Rush’s “Tom Sawyer” underneath a remix of his own “Drones Over BKLYN.” Now he’s produced an album for perennially underrated Atlanta rapper Killer Mike, due May 15 on Williams Street Records, which is basically an outlet that lets the people behind Adult Swim’s original programming hype music they like....

Sizwe Banzi Is Dead Court Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Yet this two-man play, written by Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona (and originally performed by Kani and Ntshona) asserts blacks’ outlawed humanity even as it demonstrates how worthless their lives could be under apartheid. At one point a character strips off his clothes and shouts, “I’m a man. I’ve got eyes to see....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mayor Daley responded a couple days later by suggesting that Reilly and critics of the plan were more concerned about noise the helicopters would make than about the lives of children. In a subsequent interview, Reilly politely returned the put-down. “I knew the mayor was supportive of the helipad portion of the project,” Reilly said. “Our only real difference of opinion here is that I think the city has an obligation to show that this is not a risk to public safety before we approve it....

A reason you might end up at Late Bar on a Friday night hell-bent on having a good time: Alice’s was a madhouse. Yeah, the Avondale karaoke bar sounds like a good idea until you walk into a swamp of college students, one of whom has a microphone and is wailing “Hey, Soul Sister” by Train. Do the smart thing and get the hell out of there (with plans to revisit on a weeknight, of course), and hoof it one short block east to Late Bar....

Black student enrollment at Northwestern University was almost nil prior to the mid-1960s, when, thanks mostly to civil rights legislation, things abruptly changed. According to NU’s African American Student Affairs office, the freshman class of ’65 included only five blacks; by the fall of ’68, when Angela Jackson got there, that number had jumped to over 100. But the preppy, white-bread school wasn’t ready for them. The spring before Jackson arrived, in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr....

Jay Paul Deratany is running what can only be called a Claypoolian campaign against incumbent Cook County Board of Review commissioner Joseph Berrios. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Berrios is the longest-serving member of the board, a three-person panel that plays a key role in determining who pays what in property taxes. To understand how, you need to know a thing or two about property taxes—I’ll keep it short....

Few Chicagoans exemplify the taken-for-granted local genius better than Bobby Broom. He’s one of the greatest guitarists in jazz today, but because he holds down a few low-key weekly gigs when he’s in town, he doesn’t get the attention he deserves. Discovered at 16 by Sonny Rollins, he played in the tenor titan’s band in the 80s, rejoined it in 2005, and appeared on last year’s Sonny, Please. Broom’s superb new album with his own trio, Song and Dance (Origin), shows off his monster skills as a straight-ahead improviser....

Cage’s latest, the autobiographical 2005 album Hell’s Winter (Definitive Jux), is a big departure from the lurid shock rap on which he built his reputation, but it still makes 8 Mile look like The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Born on a West German army base, Cage (aka Chris Palko) moved to the States with his parents at age four after his father was discharged for using and selling heroin; in “Too Heavy for Cherubs” he describes helping him tie off to shoot up....

The International Latino Cultural Center presents the 23rd Chicago Latino Film Festival, with screenings Friday, April 13, through Thursday, April 26, at Chicago History Museum, Facets Cinematheque, Landmark’s Century Centre, Pipers Alley, and smaller venues throughout the city and suburbs. Unless otherwise noted, tickets are $9-$10, and a festival pass, good for ten screenings, is $80. Discounts are available for students, seniors, the disabled, and ILCC members. For ticket orders or additional screenings visit latinocultural...

Chicago’s homicide rate has drawn headlines this year, locally and nationally, and not without reason. Through July, 308 people had been slain here, 27 percent more than in the first seven months of 2011. Using the same two sets of communities, we extended our analysis beyond homicide—the eighth-leading cause of death in Chicago—to other, more common causes of death. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Our comparison shows that poor African-American neighborhoods should come with a surgeon general’s warning....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last night at the Hungry Brain I caught the Chicago debut of a nine-piece band from Richmond, Virginia, called Fight the Big Bull (clearly someone in the band is fluent in Spanish–it’s the default language on their Web site). They’d been invited to town by Ken Vandermark, who met bandleader and guitarist Matt White in Richmond a few years ago....

We’ve been waiting on Humboldt Park, the first LP by Chicago instrumental quartet Teith, for what seems like ages. The band split in 2010 (three members, including Pelican guitarist Trevor de Brauw, are now in Let’s Pet), and on Tue 1/29 Humboldt Park comes out on vinyl via de Brauw’s label, Migration Media. Teith’s music is a heavy postgenre slurry of EDM synth burble, spiked shoegaze wash, and lumbering bass buzz....

Former Chicago actor Harry Lennix, whose screen credits range from Robert Townsend’s The Five Heartbeats and Spike Lee’s Get On the Bus to recurring roles on such TV series as ER, 24, and the hilarious Little Britain USA (in which he played an Obama-like American president forced to fend off the outrageous sexual advances of the British prime minister), will participate as a special guest artist in a benefit for Pegasus Players on Monday, January 3....

Here’s what happened Monday. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Vossler, a renegade FBI agent, needs to be captured and interrogated. Only Vossler knows where Dubaku is holding President Allison Taylor’s husband, And Dubaku has just told her that if she doesn’t call off the invasion of Sangala and deliver Motobo, the rightful leader of Sangala, into his hands by 4 PM, her husband will die....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Jacques Rivette calls Celine & Julie Go Boating a fun picture. But fun for whom? Not the audience. Rivette, one of the most talented of the original New Wave group in France, has degenerated in his recent work from disciplined, relevant statements of genuine humanistic interest to self-indulgent exercises that are intended solely to please himself and the people he works with....

Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom I’m grateful to professor Mary Patten for introducing Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom last week at the Gene Siskel Film Center (it screened as part of her ongoing film-and-lecture series “Revolution in the Air”). Patten contextualized the movie in terms of European history and Pasolini’s career as a public intellectual, explaining how Salo built upon the pessimistic view of modern society he introduced in his essays....

Over a pot of tea at Petro’s, the politician-infested diner across the street from the Thompson Center, Pat Quinn was extolling his accomplishments as Illinois governor. Actually, he was extolling the commercials about his accomplishments. “Mayor Daley’s in one of them,” Quinn said. “He’s saying the whole state of Illinois should be grateful to me for getting Ford to expand here, 1,200 new jobs, and then we have the president reiterating: 1,200 new jobs, an entire second shift....

The very first thing Mayor Daley will miss is his driver. Though Mayor Daley didn’t comment for this article, the Reader solicited advice and anecdotes from seven ex-pols to help shed light on Daley’s impending transition. They said Daley will need to acclimate himself to a wholly unfamiliar emotional, intellectual, social world—more comfortable, less stimulating, in many ways easier and yet demanding of new skills and real wisdom. Another of the obvious perils of public life is the loss of privacy....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I knew nothing about Rev. Wright or Trinity until I attended McCormick Theological Seminary, a graduate school in Hyde Park, from 1997 to 2000. The student body was mostly white, but I’m pretty sure Trinity had more of us enrolled than any other congregation. Trinity was presented to me and everyone else as a welcome and open place whose pastor and members were dedicated to social justice, especially for the people in their own neighborhoods; and the 20 or so people I knew who went there—including several church leaders—were universally warm, respectful, and open-minded....

Telefon Tel Aviv’s new Immolate Yourself opens with a song called “The Birds,” and at first it sounds like business as usual for the local electronic duo: swelling billows of ambient synth, colored by dabs of distortion, and behind them the steady heartbeat of a Moroder-style pulse. But the meticulously programmed glitch tracks that Charles Cooper and Joshua Eustis have made their name with never kick in—instead of one of their usual IDM-inflected microsuites, “The Birds” turns into a dark, almost scruffy techno-pop number, with actual human fingerprints all over it....