Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ryan Dempster has a pitching motion in which he appears to screw the ball into his glove, as if he were twisting the top on a Molotov cocktail he’s about to throw. Did he ever throw one Wednesday–right into the Cubs’ dugout. The wind was blowing in at Wrigley Field for the first playoff game with the Dodgers, and before it got started manager Lou Piniella had warned: “Both teams are going to have to play good defense, and you’re going to have to stay away from the walks....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » According to Lampo’s website, “Tztztztzt Î Í Í…,” the piece Vida is premiering, is a sound poem of the same title performed by Sarah Magenheimer, Tyondai Braxton, and Vida. As best as I can determine from the composer’s description, the video component includes footage of performers in action as well as abstracted representations, both visually and sonically, of their facial movement and the sounds they made....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “The City was paid, conservatively, $997 million less for this 75-year lease than the City would have received from 75 years of parking-meter revenue had it retained the parking-meter system under the same terms that the City agreed to in the lease,” states the report, the result of a five-month investigation. The city received about $1.16 billion in its deal with Chicago Parking Meters LLC....

Philip Montoro, Reader music editor Vukari at Ultra Lounge on Sat 11/2 In June, when local atmospheric black-metal band Vukari self-released its debut full-length, Matriarch, it was a studio-only project led by guitarist, vocalist, and composer Marek Cimochowicz. I was lucky enough to see the band’s first live set, which I’m sure fans will still be talking about years from now—the furiously melodic, flawlessly paced, hair-raisingly beautiful songs made the leap to the stage with barely a hiccup....

In 2006, at age 32, Ingrid Fliter won the Gilmore award, given every four years by a panel that travels the world incognito judging pianists in concert. The prize is $300,000, and the prestige can transform careers, as it has for past recipients Leif Ove Andsnes and Piotr Anderszewski. At the recommendation of pianist Martha Argerich, Fliter left her native Argentina in 1992 to study in Europe, where she went on to win a silver medal in the 2000 International Chopin Competition–not surprising given the affinity for the composer revealed by her two CDs, both recorded live at Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The 100-Mile Diet was a yearlong project in utopian living undertaken by Smith and MacKinnon, two Vancouver-based writers (he a former editor of Adbusters) hereinafter referred to as SMacK. On their Web site, the epiphanic moment is described in appropriately idyllic prose: “Like many great adventures, the 100-mile diet began with a memorable feast. Stranded in their off-the-grid summer cottage in the Canadian wilderness, Alisa Smith and J....

Jack “Boss” Hogg plucks a bag from the end of the line at the Peerless Potato Chips plant, rips it open, and dumps it. The machinery is supposed to drop exactly three ounces of freshly fried chips into each one, but every so often the scale hiccups, and Hogg, who’s packing them into boxes, can feel it when one is light. “I’ve been doing it for almost 50 years,” he says....

The kind of music I write could be uncomfortable to listen to, in an interesting way. It’s almost like reading a passage and you’re like, “Whoa, that’s intense. I need to take a break from it.” Maybe it’s audacious to say that my music does that to people, but I often feel like I need to take a break from it myself. I think that’s why I enjoyed playing with Will [Oldham] so much, because it was a chance to sing somebody else’s music, to hear how somebody else approaches songs, to actually listen to something....

Four years ago Rhymefest, aka Che Smith, seemed poised to be Chicago’s next breakout hip-hop artist. A nimble lyricist with a sharp wit coloring his conscious streak, he’d shared a Grammy with Kanye in 2005 for cowriting “Jesus Walks,” and he was scheduled to release his first proper album, Blue Collar, on Allido, an imprint of J Records run by DJ and producer Mark Ronson. But Blue Collar was met with a collective shrug when it came out in July 2006....

“What you hold now is a serious volume of sensible advice.” I imagine Ian Svenonius nodding contentedly to himself after typing that line, knowing he’s about to plunge deep into satirical nonsense by “summoning” the spirits of dead stars (Brian Jones, Buddy Holly, and Jimi Hendrix, among others) to instruct the reader on how to build a better rock ‘n’ roll group. As front man for influential postpunk and lo-fi garage bands like the Nation of Ulysses and the Make-Up (and current leader of Chain & the Gang), the always snazzy Svenonius has rocked soulful, falsetto-topped sass and five-dollar wordage for more than two decades, communicating an anticapitalist message that keeps him on the fringe—which is where he’s most comfortable....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On Sunday, thanks to a missed gimme . . . I mean, “field goal” by Baltimore Ravens kicker Billy Cundiff, I’m out five bucks to Reader writer Kevin Warwick. And the New England Patriots are going to the Super Bowl. The Pats will face the New York Giants, who, if you aren’t a football fan or forgot about the game, stunned New England in Super Bowl XLII just four years ago....

The Brotherhood by 18th Street Brewery and Pipeworks The Kickstarter page for the nascent 18th Street Brewery bears the headline “Proud to become Gary’s first ever brewery.” I’d be surprised if that were true, given that the city was founded in 1906—and of course the Melanie Brewery Company, maker of cult-favorite cheapo lager Beer 30, is based in Gary, Indiana (though you could argue that it doesn’t count because it does all its brewing by contract in Wisconsin)....

If all you know of disco is “YMCA” or, worse, if you think you hate disco from having “YMCA” shoved repeatedly down your ear holes, you need Fabriclive 36. With this mix LCD Soundsystem’s resident DJs–yes I know I’m jocking them, no I don’t care–celebrate kitsch-free underground classics that bang as hard now as they did the last time coke was this popular. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Taken individually, the songs on Fancy Footwork are proven dance-floor fillers and mix-CD destroyers....

Sigh. 15 years after Campbell v. Acuff-Rose, apparently word still hasn’t gotten around that sampling isn’t plagiarism. It’s way different. Kanye West is no more a thief than T.S. Eliot. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The whole purpose of prohibitions (legal and societal) against plagiarism is to prevent artists from taking work that isn’t theirs and passing it off as their own. For reasons I’ll never really understand, critics like Keller always emphasize the act of using someone else’s work without taking into account the second part of the equation, which is really what separates plagiarism from artistic recycling....

A first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I don’t look the part, which is kind of fun. My first bureau car was a minivan. I had a guy who wouldn’t give me documents for a subpoena. He was like, ‘I’m going to need some confirmation that you’re an FBI agent.’ Seriously? I have the badge, I have the gun, give me the docs....

This is allegedly the last bottle of Umami Stout in Illinois. But Maria’s still has six kegs of it. In September, when I wrote about the launch of Marz Community Brewing, I included this aside: “They’re developing a frankly insane-sounding ‘umami’ stout with Against the Grain in Louisville—it’ll include beer aged in brandy barrels and in, get this, soy-sauce barrels.” Even before our first sip, it was clear we were dealing with something strange and potentially wonderful....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Since releasing their striking debut album, Blow Up, in 2009, Bogota band Bomba Estereo have been frequent visitors to Chicago, playing their jacked-up, slightly reggaefied and electro-charged cumbia to any local venue willing to have them—Brilliant Corners of Popular Amusements, Rumba, the Empty Bottle, Green Dolphin Street. On Tuesday they’re finally dropping the follow-up, Elegancia Tropical (Pelon). I’ve only been able to listen to it a couple of times yet, but Bomba Estereo definitely downplay their Colombian roots on most of the tracks, moving toward a more cosmopolitan and rootless dance pop....

Fancy a little ballyhoo after your hullabaloo—or vice versa? Apparently Steppenwolf Theatre Company doesn’t like to see an evening’s entertainment come to an end either. Hence the After Party: a late-night addendum to Garage Rep, Steppenwolf’s annual showcase of productions by small Chicago theaters. You’re not obliged to attend one, however, in order to see the other. First on TAP is an expanded edition of Salonathon (3/7), the artists’ gathering that typically runs on Mondays at Beauty Bar in Noble Square....

For a brief moment in the late 80s and early 90s the New York-based Native Tongues crew made braininess and political consciousness the coolest qualities in hip-hop culture—and then gangsta rap exploded and put an end to all that. There were a lot of great groups under the Native Tongues banner—A Tribe Called Quest, the Jungle Brothers, Black Sheep—but De La Soul were arguably the most fun. Though they addressed heavy social issues without hesitation (a Native Tongues trademark), the trio of Posdnuos, Maseo, and Trugoy did so with wry, self-deprecating humor and a laid-back vibe that almost made them sound like hippies....

Reader contributor Bert Stabler took his inspiration for “Program/Suffer/Abstain/Deprogram” from Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus, who proposed that we detach ourselves from “things that are not up to us.” Stabler notes that detachment isn’t a “neutral absence but a positive refusal,” and that to abstain from suffering, for instance, is to “refuse to live.” He’s filled a gallery at Harold Washington College with work by various artists that he says is about “erasing and overwriting onself, negatively and positively....