Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Boston guitarist Eric Hofbauer considers the three solo albums he made between 2004 and 2012 a trilogy “about process, coming of age, or coming to terms with the internal and external world.” That’s quite a statement for three records of instrumental music, and without his voluminous, erudite liner notes it would be pretty hard to glean any sort of greater meaning from the performances....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Los Hermanos gracefully incorporate dashes of bossa nova, samba, and other Brazilian forms into their music, but they’re a rock combo at heart, albeit one with a remarkably sophisticated melodic sensibility and an impressive gift for elaborate arrangements. The group hasn’t released a new record since its fourth, the aptly titled 4 (Sony/BMG, Brazil), back in 2005, and in April 2007 it went on hiatus....

Jason Saldanha, Sound Opinions producer and webmaster, is looking into the mouth of: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Morris, who is a director of Iannucci’s upcoming HBO series Veep, boldly goes where very few have gone before—jihadist comedy. Four Lions is about the struggle of radicalized Muslim youth in Sheffield, England, and the follies that ensue in their attempt to change the cultural hierarchy....

Wrong: Why Experts Keep Failing Us—and How to Know When Not to Trust Them David H. Freedman (Little, Brown) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Of course, the tech guy and other modern experts are more effective than some rustic auto-da-fé—right? David H. Freedman‘s Wrong may make you wonder. Experts, Freedman argues quite convincingly, don’t know what they’re talking about most of the time. The rest of the time, they really don’t know what they’re talking about....

Hjboyd/Wikimedia Commons Amoeba’s San Francisco store Missouri rock group the Banastre Tarleton Band began releasing music in the late 70s, and some of its albums are available from CD Baby. Its front man and namesake, 62-year-old Banastre Tarleton, also sells physical copies of selected releases from his decades-long discography on his own website, including vinyl copies of his group’s hard-to-find debut, Electric Women, which came out during their brief stay in Chicago....

From Miklos Jansco’s wide-screen masterpiece The Red and the White In the comments section of my post from last Monday about wide-screen cinematography, someone who signed off as “JM” opined that “the idea of perceptual freedom due to wide-screen/depth-of-field seems sort-of misapplied to [The Vikings] and a lot of other films (even [Otto Preminger’s] Bonjour Tristesse).I think that observation has become cliche in film criticism, not there isn’t ever any truth to it....

Finding Meaning in Deference Back in April, I reported that when San Francisco’s Blasted Canyons arrived home from this year’s SXSW, they immediately broke up. Turns out they weren’t the only ones: Castle Face labelmates the Mallard called it day once they got home from tour as well, which was a bummer because they were a band who were always awesome, and judging by the shows of theirs I had seen in Austin, they were only getting better....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As the house lights came up in the Museum of Contemporary Art auditorium, event cochair Lisa Yun Lee asked everyone to take out their cell phones, turn them on, and text a donation. Winners had been chosen during a nine-month process that involved 35 local nominators and five jury panels of national arts leaders. Then—whew—$700, followed in blessedly more rapid increments to $1,250, when the audience was released to make its way upstairs, where food, drink, and music awaited and the continuing tally would be projected on a wall....

A Chicago Sojourn achicagosojourn.blogspot.com Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A tie: If you’re reading this, it probably means you live in arguably the greatest city for architecture in America. Whether it’s locals like Adam Gill working in Dubai or starchitects from elsewhere working on historically significant canvases like the IIT campus, Chicago’s given the world some of its most important buildings and gotten some in return....

The local rock scene has enjoyed something of a psychedelic renaissance over the past few years, with groups such as Disappears and Cave combining the essence of the style with a variety of other sounds. But some of the most interesting Chicagoan reinterpretations of psych haven’t been by rock bands but by producers. Leading the pack are Sich Mang, The-Drum, and Supreme Cuts. Sich Mang morphs the uptempo dance music called footwork into a heady, spaced-out sound they’ve christened “wurkstep”; The-Drum and Supreme Cuts aren’t so keen on labeling their eclectic styles, but their trippy takes on R&B (and, in Supreme Cuts’ case, an array of hip-hop subgenres too) fit right in with Sich Mang’s oeuvre....

Michael Gebert: Basically, your book says that vegetarianism not only goes back to the 18th century, but that it parallels a lot of other reform movements of the time—the Great Awakening, abolition, temperance, the first stirrings of feminism. How did vegetarianism fit into that whole picture? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Adam D. Shprintzen: Vegetarianism starts out as this small religious reform group that imports itself to the United States from England, the Bible Christian Church....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If we assume that superhero fiction derives from societal wish-fulfillment (cf. Hugo Hercules and urban transportation paranoia), which I think is a reasonable assumption, it’s pretty remarkable–I don’t think I’m spoiling too much by saying that the movie expresses America’s barely subconscious desire to geopolitically unfuck ourselves. Iron Man, the character, exists for two reasons: to kill all the bad guys and save all the civilians with the help of a special superhero PDA, and to go around blowing up all the weapons that we made that ended up in the hands of our enemies....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For years I’d heard about Darezhan Omirbaev, one of Kazakhstan’s most respected living filmmakers, though I hadn’t been able to see any of his work. Even in the DVD era—when supposedly “everything” is available—central Asian movies remain difficult to come by. Facets Multimedia has a copy of his Killer (1998), but that’s all I’ve been able to track down in Chicago....

The French New Wave—among the most important and influential eras in the history of cinema—still resonates in the minds of many film critics. During an era when Hollywood movies were considered hopelessly crass, young turks like Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut proclaimed the films of John Ford, Howard Hawks, and Alfred Hitchcock to be high art. “Auteur theory,” the idea of the director as a film’s primary author, eventually became the guiding principle of most contemporary film criticism....

QMy question is one of etiquette. My lesbian wife and I live in an apartment. The noise pollution between flats can be pretty bad. Anyone who lives in the building is aware of this, and keeping noise down after certain hours is a common courtesy. I wouldn’t play loud music after a certain hour, or let doors slam, or break out the drum kit. If any of these things happen after around 11:30 PM on a work night, I don’t think I’d feel any qualms about going around to whoever is being inconsiderate and asking them to keep it down....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » People yell out songs for him to play, and they are of course ignored. “These guys came from Utah and asked me to play like six songs, and I’m not going to play any of them,” he shrugs. Someone yells out, “Fade to Black!” That sparks his attention. At the end of his set, Kinsella announces, “Okay, now I’m going to play every riff I know from ‘Fade to Black....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There’s no love lost between Williams and Baim, frequent journalistic rivals over the years, but she could abide a friendly word on his behalf. What ticked her off was what came next. “Instead,” Davenport went on, “the documentary features Tracy Baim . . . as both a subject and a contributing resource. [Coproducer Dan Andries] insists that Baim didn’t control access to the information and had no editorial input, but it’s hard to believe she had no influence over the documentary, given that producers used her own interviews for research and relied heavily on her newspaper archives....

Last summer Woodridge resident Doug Fletcher was visiting his older brother, Bob, in Canada, when Bob mentioned that an artist he’d purchased a painting from in 1976 might now be “kind of famous.” At least, that’s what a friend had told him. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bob now does construction work; Doug is a health-care recruiter and interfaith pastor. Neither of them is schooled in art, but upon viewing the painting Doug said he’d do some googling when he got home....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The 12th season debuted in August with a few alterations: the runway shows are now anonymous, so the panel judges the work without knowing who’s behind it. The designers have to manage their own spending. But the most interesting updates concern Tim Gunn, who acts as the designers’ mentor. His spot-on critiques, along with his “Make it work” mantra (it is definitely not just a catchphrase), have made him a fan favorite....

A Playwright’s Response Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Thanks for your review of Dr Egg and the Man With No Ear [September 18]. I am… visiting from Sydney, Australia, for a week to see the early performances here…. Suffice to say we have considered the message very strongly in the development, and tried to depict a scientist who has a mixture of both altruistic motives and desires for fame, rather than the archetypal ‘mad, bad’ scientist....