In 2010 the minimalist piano trio Dawn of Midi released their all-improvised debut album First (Accretions), operating a bit like Australia’s Necks. As I wrote of the music then, “[pianist Amino] Belyamani generally sticks to a tight range of notes in each piece, creating a dazzling variety of phrases from that limited vocabulary in a way that reminds me of Chris Abrahams of the Necks, except without Abrahams’s clear forward movement; rather than morphing from one shape to another, his oblique melodies emerge and dissolve like waves lapping at the shore....

Amanda Ross-Ho Mannequin head under construction As Anish Kapoor can likely attest, once you introduce a work of art into the public realm, the people will claim it as their own. Public art is, by definition, removed from the hermetic atmosphere of galleries or museums, institutions in which the narrative can be controlled. It’s through interaction with the art—in ways ranging from quiet contemplation to poking at it with churros—that the public does the work of imbuing the art with meaning....

A multidisciplinary collective in which a cast of twentysomethings share a commercial loft roughly 4,000 square feet in size and host events ranging from DJ-fronted dance parties to folk shows to poetry readings might find itself in an occasional kerfuffle. Too many cooks spoil the broth: it’s usually a decent idiom to live by. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But this north-side collective—which I won’t be referring to by name, in order to protect its underground status—has an open-jam vibe about it....

Jaime “El-P” Meline and Emmanuel “Million Dollar Mano” Nickerson couldn’t be more different, at least as far as their images go. El-P is a respected elder in the underground rap world, with a well-deserved reputation as a serious dude that he’s earned both with his music and with his outspoken criticism of industry politics. Mano is a cocky young upstart who recently got his first big mainstream exposure by drafting off Kanye West and Jay-Z—he DJed on their recent Watch the Throne tour—and who just formed a collective called Treated Crew, named for a local slang term that means somebody’s lost face....

FESTIVAL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Presented by the Foundation for Asian American Independent Media and the Gene Siskel Film Center, the 16th annual Asian American Showcase runs Friday, April 1, through Thursday, April 14. Among the features screening this week are Chil Kong’s documentary The Mikado Project, about an experimental Asian-American theater company thrown into turmoil by the artistic director’s suggestion that they stage Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado (Sat 4/2, 6:30 PM); Miao Wang’s documentary Beijing Taxi, which focuses on three cabdrivers in the Chinese metropolis (Sun 4/3, 6 PM, and Wed 4/6, 8 PM); and Lesley Loksi Chan’s documentary Redress Remix, about the reactions of Canadian Chinese to the official apology of Prime Minister Stephen Harper for the nation’s history of institutionalized racism (Mon 4/4, 6:15 PM)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Monday night I attended the first of a series of beer dinners produced by craft beer distributor Louis Glunz Beer, Inc. to celebrate the creation of the Glunz Beer Culinary Council, a panel of beer and food experts dedicated to pairing beer with fine foods as well as using beer as a culinary ingredient. The inaugural “industry only” event was hosted by council member Mindy Segal at Hot Chocolate and was attended by council members such as Hopleaf’s Mike Roper and beer cookbook author Lucy Saunders, as well as a handful of industry and media professionals....

ALEXI FRONT (WWW.ALEXIFRONT.COM) Kvelertak will not be performing at this event. Sorry to add to the crowding on the Chicago Craft Beer Week schedule—there are hundreds upon hundreds of events there already—but the Reader and Binny’s are partnering up for something called “Beer & Music” on Thursday, May 23. Specifically, beer manager Adam Vavrick of the Lincoln Park store has invited me to join him in conducting an experiment in synesthesia and intoxication—we’ll each be pairing four beers with favorite songs from our record collections....

The Reader’s Choice: Harold Washington Library Center Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » OK, it’s not a branch, and technically neither are the regional libraries with big video collections (Sulzer on the north side with 14,531 titles, Woodson on the south with 3,937). But if you’re patient you can have any of the library system’s 13,079 DVDs or 25,880 VHS tapes transferred to your local branch....

You heard it here first—the theme of next year’s Chicago Humanities Festival will be laughter. When Lawrence Weschler mentioned his intentions my first thought was, Is there really that much to say? Enough to drive something like 140 different programs? But there’s humor in everything, and when a panel of eminent scholars discusses gallows humor, I’ll be there. Even the gloomy talk on the future of the news business that Weschler and I had just heard could have been played for laughs....

After Uncle Paul’s fifth gin and tonic of the night, he began to sense a buzzing around him, like an old neon light. He looked up to see that Winnie’s Grill had got crowded with men, a knot of whom stood behind Paul, swaying in unison and singing along with the hopeful piano of Mary J. Blige’s “Real Love,” which played on the house stereo. Paul pressed forward in his cushion-backed stool so that his head hung over the bar....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Late last night a friend posted a link on Facebook to Sean Dunne‘s American Juggalo, a 23-minute Vimeo documentary released last year about the infamous Gathering of the Juggalos festival in Cave-In-Rock, Illinois. Having already seen it once, I watched it again, of course, and then decided to plug through the rest of the Brooklyn-based filmmaker’s Vimeo-only documentaries. Unlike American Juggalo—which is tasked with examining both a polarizing subculture and annual phenomenon—most of Dunne’s films are short, practically trailer-length profiles of idiosyncratic characters....

“If you think you know what an Arab is, you don’t,” filmmaker Usama Alshaibi says. “I don’t know either.” Yet he felt far from assimilated. “When I was a kid I felt like no one was like me here in the U.S. or in the Middle East,” Alshaibi says. “It’s this strange cross-cultural identity that’s almost a third identity. It’s neither/or.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In 1980 Iraq invaded Iran in an attempt to occupy the oil-producing and largely Arab province of Khuzestan....

Rod Blagojevich is gone but it’s still the same old Springfield with the same old cast of characters. Can our gadfly cut it? Or as I heard state senator Rickey Hendon bluntly put it Thursday night on Channel Two, “The biggest challenge that I see for Pat Quinn is to overcome the do-gooder, reformer image. Pat has to know that you have to grease the wheels — that’s the way it works — to get things done around here....

Gwynedd Stuart An Iron Throne that doesn’t have that asshole Joffrey perched on it If, as a 30-year-old woman, I could change my name and not have it be this gigantic hassle, I would change it to Daenerys Targaryen. It’s so vowely and lovely. I’ll settle for nursing baby dragons around the house in this very realistic Daenerys wig I just found on eBay for the bargain Buy It Now price of $22....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When he left his native Bangladesh to attend college in 1985–first McGill University in Montreal, then the University of Illinois at Chicago–Islam, now 42, meant to study electrical engineering, not cooking. But he’d always been interested in food; though he never cooked in Bangladesh, his family traveled a lot and dined out widely. At UIC he became obsessed with cooking, hosting dinner parties and preparing meals for friends....

“The Dead”—the final piece in James Joyce’s masterful 1914 short story collection, Dubliners—takes place 12 days after Christmas, on the Feast of the Epiphany. That’s the holy day commemorating the revelation of the Christ child to the Magi—an awfully grand way of describing three guys looking at a baby in a barnyard. But for Joyce the essential banality of the occasion was sort of the point. Though Dubliners is full of epiphanies, it’s precisely the ordinary stuff that triggers them....

Magnolia Goodman Theatrehorses at the window trap door theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s 1963—100 years after America’s Emancipation Proclamation, but still some time before jim crow’s last gasp—and headstrong, clueless Lily Forrest has returned from a trip abroad to find that her family’s fortunes have dried up and their estate, a former plantation, faces foreclosure. Neither she nor her ineffectual brother has a head for business or a facility for facing facts....

Kate Lyn Sheil (center) in Empire Builder In my recent post about tonight’s “Joe & Kris Swanberg double feature” at Doc Films, I failed to grant more than a few words to the second half of the program, Kris Swanberg’s Empire Builder. I hadn’t seen the movie yet, though I’ve caught up with it since. Compared with Silver Bullets, which screens before it, Empire is a less confrontational work, but it may be as pessimistic....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Time to put a cap on it, my interminable leave-taking—ergo: a valedictory list of favorite films for 2008. And yes, I’ve reserved a place for There Will Be Blood, notwithstanding our occasionally rancorous back ‘n’ forth about it at this site, though my real reason/excuse for including it here (aside from not wanting to see it disappear in year-end limbo) is that it didn’t get to town till early last January (ditto 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days, which opened at the Music Box in February)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One of my favorite jokes in Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance is that the movie takes place in Romania without offering any compelling explanation as to why. If you’ve seen enough cheap American genre movies in the last several years (particularly the straight-to-DVD releases), the joke should register pretty quickly. Many of these productions have been shot in Romania for financial reasons, though the films usually try to disguise the country as someplace else—and the generally witless attempts only make them feel cheaper....