September The First Transition: World Cinema in the 1930s These classic films screen on Fridays and Wednesdays as part of a lecture course at the School of the Art Institute taught by Reader contributor Jonathan Rosenbaum, though he’ll lecture only at the Wednesday shows. Scheduled for this fall: Charles Chaplin’s City Lights (9/12, 9/17), Fritz Lang’s M (9/19, 9/24), Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr (9/26, 10/1), Ernst Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise (10/3, 10/8), George Cukor’s Sylvia Scarlett (10/10, 10/15), Leo McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow (10/17, 10/22), Jean Vigo’s Zero for Conduct and Frank Borzage’s Man’s Castle (10/24, 10/29), Lewis Milestone’s Hallelujah, I’m a Bum!...

Near the beginning of Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?, filmmaker Michel Gondry admits to his interview subject, Noam Chomsky, that he’s a little nervous. Sitting down with Chomsky, who wouldn’t be? Decades before his penetrating critiques of U.S. foreign policy made him a left-wing culture hero, Chomsky revolutionized the field of linguistics with his book Syntactic Structures (1957), which proposed that syntax—the ordering of words in a sentence—was the most important element in written or verbal communication, even more important than the words themselves....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » And then he did. This is significant because if any restaurant subverts Michelin’s upholding of fine dining tradition, it’s not Next, the chameleon whose colors supposedly changed too often for Michelin to judge by its consistency-prizing criteria, but El Ideas, which simply kept the parts of fine dining Foss liked and threw out the parts he didn’t. Foss, if you haven’t followed his frequently food-news-making career, started in Chicago as chef of the Palmer House’s Lockwood, clashed with the hotel’s ways and got fired for a bong joke on Twitter, started a food truck back when that was the hot thing ....

The first time I heard Koenji Hyakkei, a manic, operatic prog band led by Japanese drummer and composer Tatsuya Yoshida, I relived the rush I got when I first heard Yoshida’s long-running duo Ruins: not only had some sort of musical sound barrier been broken, but it’d been done by an unidentifiable craft from about three centuries in the future. Yoshida’s music moves as fast as sparks jumping synapses, as though his brain were a supercomputer....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This year, though, the mayor is lending his name to several campaigns. Daley endorsed Barack Obama for president more than a year ago, and the other day he even worked the phones on Obama’s behalf. But last month he waded into a much-lower-profile county race by backing 28th Ward alderman Ed Smith, a frequent City Council foe, for Cook County Recorder of Deeds....

The third Architecture & Design Film Festival runs Thursday through Monday, April 12 through 16, at Music Box, with 31 films screening in 15 different programs. Tickets are $11, with packages available for $45 (five tickets) and $90 (13 tickets). Following are selected films screening; for a full schedule see adfilmfest.com. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Detroit Wild City French filmmaker Florent Tillon calls RoboCop one of his favorite movies, but his 2010 documentary owes little to Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 Motor City dystopia....

During the two and a half years it’s existed the Chicago Independent Radio Project has taken a lot of forms—a Facebook page, a record fair, logo buttons attached to jackets and messenger bags, booths at street fairs and music festivals—but so far none of them has been an actual independent radio station. That’s about to change. Two weeks ago CHIRP began webcasting to a select group of testers from its headquarters in the North Center neighborhood....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tonight octogenarian Phil Cohran, a fixture in Chicago’s creative-music community for decades, presents a musical homage to Sun Ra at the Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park. Cohran has accomplished enough to be worthy of homage himself; he played with the earliest version of Sun Ra’s Arkestra back in the 50s, cofounded the AACM, started the Affro-Arts Theater, and in the late 60s, with his Artistic Heritage Ensemble, he created a distinctive and influential strain of African-flavored jazz-funk, distinguished by the cascading, lyric lines he played on an electrified kalimba of his own design he called the Frankiphone....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » And then again, Blagojevich is in the process of being impeached and indicted, and Burris is damaged goods. Blagojevich’s appointment has done Burris the disservice of causing some people to look closely at his record for the first time in his long political career, and there isn’t much to see. Burris has his own pay-to-play history to explain away, and in a defining moment in his term as attorney general, Rolando Cruz’s appeal of his death sentence, he’s accused of ducking and covering when the the right thing to do would have required political courage....

When I first came to live in Chicago in the early 1980s, I wanted to be a writer and fancied myself a poet. But I looked more to Walt Whitman (not knowing that he was a starting point for Jorge Luis Borges and a host of other Latin Americans), Gertrude Stein, and sapphic Olga Broumas (because I was an arty young lesbian discovering the pain and thrills of sex) than to Latino poets....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It can’t be easy to stick to a style of music that demands close listening, since such aesthetic decisions narrow down an artist’s potential audience enormously. But Brooklyn duo Mountains–aka Brendon Anderegg and Koen Holtkamp–have stuck to their guns for a decade, pursuing a sound that reveals its greatest virtues only to those who really pay attention. They started playing together when both were still students at the Art Institute of Chicago, and on their third proper album, Choral (Thrill Jockey), they continue to sculpt gorgeous, layered, resolutely introverted soundscapes that never rely on beats or vocals....

“The court has even refused relief to a convicted rapist, Roy Criner, even though DNA testing conducted after trial showed the semen found in the victim wasn’t his. The case is so problematic that one judge who voted with the majority told the Tribune he now believes his vote in the case was wrong and Criner should get a new trial.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As the Tribune noted, the opinion that denied Criner a new trial was written by Judge Sharon Keller, who the paper said “has in many ways come to epitomize the current appeals court and its handling of cases....

“The Negro’s role in the history of America? A good question,” intones a 1950s-style voice-over in the opening moments of It Takes a Nation of Assholes to Hold Us Back (Cold Sweat), the second full-length from this Cleveland band. “Perhaps we can briefly try to answer this for you.” Then commence the jackhammer beats, strangulated vocals, ricocheting atonal riffs, and shout-along codas–all of which work to connect black history to the history of a different kind of blackness, the one that runs from Black Flag to Big Black and beyond....

In the flashback—you know, the scene Vincent Gallo remembers when he’s resting on his hotel bed—that female doctor asks Gallo, “You had an affair with her, didn’t you?” He says, “It wasn’t quite like that.” [laughs] That scene looks like it was shot on 16-millimeter. It’s incongruous with the rest of the film, so for it to be there, it has to have a purpose. And everything leading up to it is building on this particular mood that I can’t define....

Good law is evenhanded law, forbidding the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges (as Anatole France once observed with a snicker). Written to attract support from legislators who might not be comfortable with actual gay marriage, the civil union bill passed last week by Illinois’s General Assembly doesn’t limit its blessings to gay and lesbian couples in love. The bill’s charming conceit is that a civil union is something just like, yet other than, a marriage—and that’s why it should interest anyone who doesn’t exactly want to get married....

Pursuing a career as a composer isn’t the most prudent or practical choice—not if you want to make a living. Opportunities to have new work performed by institutions that can pay enough to live on are so scarce that competition is fierce—the people who buy symphony subscriptions generally want Bach, Beethoven and Brahms, not Francois Bayle, Johanna Beyer, or Earle Brown. Living composers almost all get left out in the cold, and even if they can succeed in the classical world, it often takes decades....

Child’s play it’s not. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s hard to say which sounds tougher—battling Lex Luthor to save the Midwest’s high-speed rail system or acting out said battle on a three-by-seven-foot platform sans set or props. Chicago’s own Theater Un-Speak-Able takes on the latter task in Superman 2050 (Wed 5/2-Sun 5/6, various times, Josephine Louis Theater, Northwestern University, 20 Arts Circle Dr....

Electronic musician Tom Jenkinson, aka Squarepusher, made his name with records such as 1997’s Big Loada EP, offering a tweaked take on drum ‘n’ bass that invited comparisons to his Warp labelmate Aphex Twin. Then in 1998 he released Music Is Rotted One Note, a sharp stylistic turn into jazz fusion that gave him the chance to show off his virtuoso electric-bass chops. Over the course of nine successive LPs he bounced between electronic and electroacoustic sounds before making a return to full-fledged EDM with this year’s strictly sequencer-­based Ufabulum....

Chicago Ave and Halsted, created more than just corner to stand on, your walls supported a society where I learned to read and jump double-dutch rope We had to start over! To commemorate the end of Cabrini-Green and call attention to its role as a haven, a group including Prague-born School of the Art Institute faculty member Jan Tichy, social worker Efrat Appel, and 25 SAIC student collaborators is preparing Project Cabrini Green—an art installation that combines LED and sound technology with short stories and poetry on the themes of home, housing, and community....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As best as I can remember, I only ever saw the Del Fuegos once, and it was a few years before the Boston band had a modest bit of breakout success in 1984 as scruffy heartland rockers. I caught them in 1983 in Philadelphia, at a show billed as “Psych-Out.” The headliners were LA’s Three O’Clock, poster children for the so-called Paisley Underground scene, which also included the Rain Parade, the Bangles, the Long Ryders, the Dream Syndicate, and Green on Red....