Chris Eichenseer American Heritage in 2012 Formed in 1997 and for the past several years split between Chicago and Atlanta, metal smart-asses American Heritage released what seems likely to be their swan song, Prolapse, last week on French label Solar Flare Records. There was no fanfare, no release party—for all intents and purposes, they were already broken up. “After the recording of Prolapse,” say the press materials for the album, “core member Adam Norden left the band, and after eighteen years of abuse and racket, this move makes it foreseeable that this will be the final album from American Heritage....

SWING VOTE ss Directed by Joshua Michael Stern Written by Stern and Jason Richman With Kevin Costner, Madeline Carroll, Paula Patton, Kelsey Grammer, Dennis Hopper, Nathan Lane, and Stanley Tucci Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ignorant clowns are but one segment of the larger, more defensible group known as swing voters. According to the Gallup Poll, about 23 percent of likely voters haven’t yet decided between John McCain and Barack Obama; a recent CBS/New York Times poll puts the figure at 36 percent....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Alèmayèhu Eshèté: Ethiopiques 22—More Vintage! (Buda) Yet another mother lode of killer sides from this legendary Ethiopian singer, who’s previously turned up in the Ethiopiques series on four compilations and one full CD. This disc collects his output for the Philips label between February 1972 and April 1974, when the golden age of modern Ethiopian music came to end with the ascendancy of the brutal Mengistu regime....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » From a rhetorical standpoint, the second part of Adam Curtis’s All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (which you can watch here) is an even greater disaster than the first. It begins and ends with grand proclamations that Curtis can’t possibly support, each one speaking about the whole of humanity as though it were a single person. It’s worth quoting at length from Curtis’s concluding monologue of the episode, which epitomizes his line of thought: “Now, in our age, we are all disillusioned with politics, and this [self-]organizing principle has risen up to be the ideology of our age....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Publisher Tony Hunter told his staff in a memo that “circulation declines were impacted by price increases, curtailment of distribution territories, the redesign, presidential endorsement and an overall reduction in subscription sales ‘pressure.’” It’s an interesting admission. In a letter to readers in January, editor Gerould Kern said that before launching the redesign, the Tribune “listened carefully to what you said you wanted in your Tribune, and the new format was created to meet those needs....

Collaboraction’s seventh annual showcase of short plays features two programs of eight new works each, most by emerging writers. The performers move around and through the audience, and during set changes viewers are invited to roam the sprawling space to socialize, change seats, view art, and buy drinks and merchandise at concession stands. When I attended program A, the well-crafted but usually forgettable playlets–most about people’s responses to the deaths of friends and loved ones–were aided by generally good acting and directing and by Sam Porretta’s slick environmental design....

In the 2006 underground classic “Harold’s 6 Piece,” the south-side hip-hop crew Dip Unit paid homage to the ungovernable craving that arises at the mere suggestion of a trip to Harold’s Chicken Shack. Set to the infectious refrain “Mild sauce, fried hard,” the four-and-a-half-minute YouTube video was a sincere, unsolicited, viral advertisement for the venerable fried-chicken kingdom, a fast-food empire that’s grown steadily for 63 years, mostly out of sight and mind of the great majority of white Chicago....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tonight, Doc Films begins their series of films directed by Mikio Naruse and starring the actress Hideko Takamine with the 1952 drama Lightning. It’s one of the most important film series in town, as eight of the nine features on the program are not officially available on DVD in the United States, and there hasn’t been a substantial Naruse series in Chicago since the Gene Siskel Film Center hosted one six years ago....

Chris Charles says he warned his star up front: “But I don’t think it really registered till his first day of shooting in downtown Chicago.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In 2006 the six friends worked on a low-budget thriller called The Devil’s Dominoes, directed by Scott Prestin, owner of the now-defunct Wicker Park bar Ginbucks. “We realized from that experience that we were more prepared than we thought to make a feature,” Charles says....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Anyone seriously sucked into the beauty and passion of vintage Ethiopian music by Buda Records’ invaluable Ethiopiques series may well wonder where the good contemporary music is from that East African country. Well, from all accounts there’s not much good stuff these days. A few years ago Terp Records, the label run by Ex guitarist Terrie Hessels, released a terrific collection of recent Ethiopian dance tracks called Ililta!...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Thursday’s opening day of the Women’s College World Series softball tournament almost saw no-hitters pitched in both ends of a doubleheader. Chicago teams were on opposite ends of the pitching gems, both carried on ESPN from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. DePaul actually almost won the opener, in spite of going hitless. The Blue Demons have a scrappy team and play a crisp brand of softball, and they’re the designated Cinderella as the only interloper to crack the top eight seeds in the WCWS....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I basically agree with it, although I think we’re well past the point of crisis and that newspapers have given up on even trying to be funny (Maureen Dowd winning the Pulitzer was the flag of surrender). Even when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s it seemed we had a dearth of newspaper humor. I remember enjoying James Lileks, who was syndicated in my local paper, and of course Dave Barry during his prime, but the funniest stuff was in the comics pages–Doonesbury, Calvin & Hobbes, and my favorite, the inestimably great Bloom County, which was probably more topical than you remember (the series about Reagan’s Star Wars initiative and the giant laser space frisbees is a classic)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Students are seduced by the glamour of high-profile chefdom into disillusionment! It’s official, the glut is here. In “Celebrity chefs boost culinary schools,” the AP reporter talks to culinary school grads who are disappointed by the life waiting for them on the outside. It’s hard to imagine how anyone could not know, despite (as the article predictably cites) Emeril and rachaelray, that professional cooking is an extremely demanding, traditionally thankless profession (part of its Bourdainian glamour, yes?...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In case you’re not satisfied with the plethora of free performances this Thursday and Saturday by members of the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra is also coordinating other events in conjunction with their visit. On Thursday, the CSO hosts a two-part symposium in Grainger Hall on the famed Venezuelan music education program known as “El Sistema....

On Thursday, May 15, when the Chicago Plan Commission conducts a hearing on Mayor Daley’s proposal to stick the Chicago Children’s Museum in Grant Park, the media, drawn by the prospect of a contentious debate, will pour into the City Council chambers, shining a spotlight on a relatively obscure public body. And what will we see? Most likely an embarrassing display of servility to the mayor. Founded almost 100 years ago at the recommendation of the Burnham Plan, the commission was always intended to be a board of mayoral appointees....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A while back I was chastised by a reader for ignoring Barack Obama’s willingness to kowtow to the local machine. I argued, more or less, that anyone who’s going to be president in this country is going to have to sacrifice some of his or her progressive bona fides. As objectionable as Mayor Daley is to some, he’s a powerful and arguably beloved leader, so staying on his good side might be worth the tradeoff for someone with Obama’s ambitions....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » La Petite Mort is the first collaboration by Central Waters of Amherst, Wisconsin. Working with dedicated nerds from the Bierwerker program of Chicago bar Local Option, they brewed the inaugural batch in November 2011 and released some of it unaged on draft in January; the bourbon-barrel version, which spent three months in Heaven Hill whiskey casks, came out in late May on draft and in late August in 22-ounce bottles....

Best Film Festival or Series Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This seems like overkill, because we’ve been featuring the EU fest in Movies all month. But without the Chicago Documentary Festival—which postponed its 2008 festival to this spring and has now canceled it altogether—the Gene Siskel Film Center’s annual March series of recent European releases is the city’s best bet for catching great new movies....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Best new director winner Marek Lechki’s drama Erratum, about a Polish man stuck in his home town after he runs over a vagrant, 5:30 p.m.Brother & Sister, Daniel Burman’s Argentinian character study of an aspiring actor and his controlling sister, best ensemble winner, 5:45 p.m.Best screenplay winner Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s Chad-set A Screaming Man, starring best actor winner Youssouf Djaoro as a demoted pool attendant, 6 p....

With Caesar Must Die, which opens Friday at Music Box, Italian directors Paolo and Vittorio Taviani embrace the two primary influences on their six-decade career: classic literature and Italian neorealist cinema. The film was shot at a maximum-security prison in Rome as inmates rehearsed a production of Julius Caesar. The U.S. documentary Shakespeare Behind Bars (2005) also recorded a prison staging of Shakespeare, but rather than show how the production impacts the prisoners’ lives, as that movie did, the Tavianis focus on the play itself, assembling an abridged version of the show from months of rehearsal footage....