Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Since it came out a few weeks ago, I’ve listened to Scott Walker’s Bish Bosch several times, almost always with friends and at top volume. I tend to be a headphone enthusiast (when the listening experience is that private, I feel like I’m disappearing into music the way I do with works of literature), but Walker’s records feel most impactful when they’re able to fill an entire room....

Philip Ghantous’s Cuban sandwich is an expertly proportioned construction of light, cracker-crisp Gonella bread, mustard, pickle, baby Swiss, ham, and mojo-marinated roasted pork shoulder. That may sound like a simple thing—unless you’ve withstood the carping of people who know southern Florida about bread as dense as a baseball bat, cheap processed meats, mustard-to-cheese ratios, and cubanos too overstuffed to allow for the properly hot, gooey integration of those ingredients. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jim Sikora’s The Critics, which opens today at the Gene Siskel Film Center, could be the most exhaustively, some might say incestuously, documented movie in the history of the Reader. Back in 1996, when Adam Langer was still writing theater criticism for the paper, he published a profile of Sikora as the latter was making his movie Bullet on a Wire....

I’ve watched so many coulda-been-contenders come and go in Chicago, throwing in the towel after a promising debut, that it’s always refreshing to see a worthy band go the distance. After two records for In the Red, the PONYS have signed to uber-indie Matador and released the long-awaited Turn the Lights Out, and I’m pleased to report they’re still in top form. This is their first disc since Ian Adams decamped, taking his jangly 12-string and wry Britpop sensibilities with him, and with his replacement, guitarist Brian Case, they sound in some ways less exuberant–they put their heads down and gallop through an obstacle course of clanging fuzz, counting on their expert knowledge of garage rock’s pleasure principle to see them through....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Joe Meno, who’s a friend—I did the illustrations for a book of his stories—was doing a reading and invited me to read, too,” Nilsen recalls. “I felt like doing a reading of comics doesn’t go well, but I had a few stories from my sketchbooks that I could use for a slide reading. They were fragments about gods and Greek myths and Bible stories....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Agitation One: So in the Sunday Tribune, the big page-one story on corruption in Illinois observes, “We’ve put an impressive collection of cheats and boodlers into public office over the decades, and the public outcry has never led to more than a token crackdown by government. So why should the curious case of Rod Blagojevich now make things different?...

A few days ago I got an e-mail from Robbie Fulks letting me know about the next installment of his ever-changing, always inventive and entertaining weekly Hideout residency on Mondays, which is now into its fourth year. I had already noted the show and planned to write something about it here, but I was still surprised to read his message, which read, in part, “just wanted to let you know your comment on Street-Legal, way back when I was preparing Slow Train Coming, stuck in my head ....

Gossip guitarist Nathan Howdeshell has been releasing a trickle of CD-Rs and singles on his Fast Weapons label since 2003, but he’s ramping up plans to issue vinyl and fanzines. One of the first new items on the schedule is an LP from Howdeshell’s side project Sleetmute Nightmute. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Summer Sessions on the Square, the Logan Square community concert series that takes place under the Illinois Centennial Monument, begins a second season on June 26....

Although they started out more than a decade ago as a capable, Pixies-like guitar band, Spoon didn’t get good until 2001’s Girls Can Tell, where they added piano and traded some grit for hooks. They didn’t get great until 2005’s near-perfect Gimme Fiction, which bent 70s-ish pop melodies to fit the melancholy avant-garde aesthetic of front man and mastermind Britt Daniel, scattering bursts of noise and ragged crooning over mechanical beats and swooning pianos....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » No, better to file daily reports on the martyrdom of Patti Blagojevich in Costa Rica (she’s spunky, she’s doing Chicago proud, and if she wins I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here it’ll be a victory for midwestern values we should all be proud of), and pretend that Rod Blagojevich’s 15 minutes aren’t over. But they are....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “In the 1980s, ‘economic development’ was frequently viewed as primarily about companies. This outlook was further popularized by the many tools available that compared states’ ‘business friendliness.’ While these ratings captured some important points, they often emphasized ‘low cost’ instead of ‘high value.’ The cheapest locations—those with low taxes and wages—got the best grades. These tools encouraged policies to weaken regulation, even if that regulation protected things like the environment and worker safety....

Not since between the ages of three and five, when I made it my short-term mission in life to convince my parents to buy me a Fisher Price Power Wheels truck, did I covet a lazy-moving, four-wheeled vehicle as badly as I did a golf cart following my visit last summer to Northport, Michigan. Located in Leelanau Township, near the tip of the mitt’s little finger, the low-key, resortlike village sits about 45 minutes north of Traverse City (and nearly six hours from Chicago) and is scattered with the no-longer-working man’s preferred mode of electric transportation....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » They admit they can’t answer their article’s title question, “Can Biodiversity Survive Global Warming?” because ecosystems are complex and different climate models predict different degrees of warming. But “it is believed that the net effects of global climate change will favor invasive species — those opportunists that can quickly exploit the new ecological niches that will open up as native species …cannot adapt…....

thursday9 LURA On the elegant new Eclipse (Four Quarters), Portuguese singer Lura expands her survey of traditional music from Cape Verde, the land of her immigrant parents: in addition to upbeat genres like batuku and funana, where she already shines, she tackles morna, the sorrowful ballad style made famous by the legendary Cesaria Evora, and proves herself a match for it. More than ever her sound is ecumenical, contemporary, and accessible, and though Jose da Silva’s production is a bit glossy for my taste—I could die happy without ever hearing another wind chime—it can’t drag down Lura’s effervescent singing....

With “Built by Fault,” the Dance COLEctive‘s Margi Cole takes a giant step in a new direction. The kick in the pants for Cole was her participation in the Solo Performance Commissioning Project led by Deborah Hay, a driving force in the Judson Dance Theater revolution of the 1960s. Cole was part of an international cadre of 20 experienced dancers who traveled to Findhorn, Scotland, where Hay created a movement “score” that each participant then interpreted individually with Hay’s feedback....

Words do have meaning yet, I hope. As does conciseness and exactitude. In these days when Bush & Co. cast their pollution-increasing environmental policies as “blue skies” policy, it does take a critical eye to discern objectivity versus subjectivity or spin. In Ms. Connelly’s review of There’s No Jose Here [“Invisible America,” January 26], re immigrant life in America, she bends the truth when she says the author, Gabriel Thompson, “avoids taking a stand on the immigration debate” and then gives as an example of his lack of bias his word choices thus: “While Enrique is a documented immigrant–Thompson uses documented and undocumented rather than legal and illegal....

This South African troupe’s artistic director, Vincent Mantsoe, isn’t the first choreographer to blend African dance with other forms. But from what I’ve seen, he’s the best. Men-Jaro (“Friendship”) has a theme–integrating the native dances of its members, originally from France, America, Japan, and South Africa–and subtly alludes to Renaissance court dances, Japanese theater, and so on. But its real beauty lies in its light touch and expert, deeply felt performances....

No, this Guinean kora player and vocalist can’t clear the bar for sonic innovation set by Jimi Hendrix. That understood, the title Electric Griot Land (Totolo) gives you a pretty good idea about the contents of his bold second album. Cissoko’s sound is grounded in the hypnotic, circular structures of ancient Mande songs, but the interlocking lines played on traditional instruments like kora, balafon, ngoni, calabash, and djembe are often run through guitar effects like wah-wah....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A touch of Indian summer rolls into Chicago this week, but the fall music calendar remains full of good reasons not to spend the evening outdoors. After the jump I get to some of the blockbuster shows written up on this week’s Soundboard, and right now I can tell you about a few more noteworthy concerts happening. On Monday you’ve got the Swedish House Mafia pounding the floors at the Mid and former Chicagoan Kurt Elling crooning up a storm on the final night of a short engagement at City Winery....

The line on Django Unchained, the latest from Quentin Tarantino, is that it’s a companion piece to his previous feature, Inglourious Basterds. Both are genre pieces that function as racial revenge fantasies: the war movie Inglourious Basterds shows Jewish-American soldiers slaughtering Nazis in occupied France, and the western Django Unchained follows a freed slave in the antebellum south as he guns down hillbillies, plantation owners, and Klansmen. Both movies play fast and loose with history: Inglourious Basterds ends with Hitler being assassinated, and Django Unchained, set in 1858, is filled with implausible characters and events....