M.I.A. is known for having a keen ear for talent, so it’s no surprise she’s picked up Chicago expat and Pit Er Pat drummer Butchy Fuego to the man the kit for recent live dates. Fuego, who moved to LA in 2009, has also recently done time with the Boredoms. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Numero Group‘s exploration of underheralded local soul will continue this fall with an exhaustive Syl Johnson box, slated for release on October 19....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Experimental drone collective Chord, featuring Pelican’s Trevor de Brauw, will be playing their only show of the year tomorrow night at the Burlington, where they’ll be deviating from their typical, minimal path. The band, made up of heavy and experimental musicians from around Chicago, base their performances and recordings on a single chord. Each member is assigned a single note from a specific chord, and the goal is to exploit and push it to its furthest sonic capabilities, experimenting with tone, texture, mood, and volume....

Cortland Pinnick was six years old when he saw his mother’s head turned almost all the way around on her neck. They were heading south in a rented car on I-65 near Crown Point, Indiana, on their way back to Atlanta after a family visit to Joliet. Cortland’s mother, Melissa, was sitting in the front seat next to the driver, her cousin Constance McNair. Cortland and his 21-month-old sister, Manna, shared the backseat with McNair’s two children....

Suppose I told you that Australia’s Back to Back Theatre works with “intellectually disabled” actors? What would you expect from one of their shows? Drama therapy? Elementary theater games? A bunch of sweet simpletons making an endearing hash of, say, a scene from The Odd Couple? Or The Boys Next Door? I know I imagined all sorts of feel-good crap—until I saw a DVD of Back to Back’s Ganesh Versus the Third Reich, as staged at Malthouse Theatre in Melbourne....

JAZZ | Peter Margasak Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Daisy met the Seldoms’ artistic director, Carrie Hanson, in summer 2009, when he was giving a solo concert at Experimental Sound Studio. He ended up writing and performing a solo percussion piece for Marchland, which the company premiered in March 2010 at the Museum of Contemporary Art. For This Is Not a Dance Concert, Daisy and Hanson began working independently, but for the past month they’ve been rehearsing together, editing and reshaping their material....

Word that workers would be fired began to spread through Ballco Manufacturing in August. The Aurora company, which makes valve components, was staffed largely by Mexican immigrants. Eduardo Soria, who’d worked there for a decade as a machine operator, says the rumors started after Latino employees were asked to take on white trainees. A factory supervisor claimed to be adding a shift, Soria says, but some of the workers doubted it....

Sun-Times An abandoned building in Woodlawn in 2011. The foreclosure crisis expanded the wealth gap between whites and minorities. “To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships,” W.E.B. Dubois wrote in The Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903. One hundred and ten years later, blacks and Hispanics are making half as much as whites, a recent Urban Institute report shows....

MATT WILSON’S ARTS & CRAFTS | THE SCENIC ROUTE (PALMETTO) INFO 773-878-5552 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Irwin, a veteran bassist with a huge resume, balances Wilson’s irony with a dry tone and impeccable note choices. Stafford, a young classically trained trumpeter, has finally shed the last vestiges of his concert-hall posture–you can practically feel the swing start down in his knees and work its way up to his horn....

How do you think the Children’s Museum vote will shake out Wednesday in the City Council? Not well for foes of the museum plan, in our estimation—we smell a rout. And we’re going to lay out how exactly we think it will break down. What say you? Predict the final tally right and you’ll win … our sincere respect. Or something like that. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » MICK SAYS...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Fashion has a lot to do with artifice. The appeal of street-style photos is that they are based in real life and so can be more exhilarating than even the most gorgeous, perfectly produced photo shoot. They emphasize that fashion can be as much a part of reality as we choose to make it. Other bloggers shoot their own ensembles, so I suppose you could argue that they’re “staged,” but only in the sense that they’re trying to make an attractive record of what they’re actually wearing....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One of the more provocative comments Richard Longworth made in my March 20 Hot Type on his new book, Caught in the Middle: America’s Heartland in the Age of Globalism, concerned the fitful record of midwestern papers at putting hometown issues in a global context. Best, Longworth told me, is probably the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. The Chicago Tribune “has a very good foreign staff, but needs to work harder at linking their stories to readers in Chicago....

Americans who had never heard of Roland Burris—and that would be just about everybody outside Illinois—know him now as the man with the tombstone. The tombstone identifies him as a familiar type, the sort of fellow who back in high school joined nerdy organizations like French club and toastmasters and ran for vice president, an office that came with none of the responsibilities of the president but took up just as much space in the yearbook....

There’s a cancer in American everyburg Saline, and it’s called theater. When the townsfolk turn to a traveling priest/illusionist (or “preagician”) to deprogram their thespiatized kids, his suggestion–put on a cautionary show about putting on shows–seems so stupid it just might work. But treading the boards, even in protest, proves a slippery slope. Annoyance continues its pursuit of the antimusical with this broad-as-a-barn parody, cheerfully flogging The Music Man in particular: “This town’s got talent,” goes one number....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Suspecting that, at the very least, the place would be a good option for River North professionals, a colleague and I staged a mock business meeting here to see if our hypothesis held water. It did, and more—it held juice. In fact, the fresh house-made juices were the highlight of our meal. The Dr. Defense—with apple, cinnamon, and black pepper—was a cidery intro to fall flavors, while my companion’s Blue Boost (blueberry juice, white grape juice, and basil) distilled the last of summer....

Julia Thiel When it comes to beer there’s rare and then there’s really, really rare. There’s plenty of stuff out there that’s not widely available but definitely obtainable for anyone who’s making an effort. Then there are the beers like Westvleteren XII, brewed in Belgium by Trappist monks, which has been sold legally only once in the U.S. Or Dark Lord, which you have to wait in line for hours to buy—and you can only do that once a year, and only if you’ve been lucky enough to get a ticket that allows you the privilege....

Classical: So Percussion founder Doug Perkins moves to Chicago One of the highlights of the 2012 classical season was August’s performance of the John Luther Adams percussion piece Inuksuit, which took place all over the Pritzker Pavilion grounds despite steady rain. Percussionist Doug Perkins masterminded the concert (as well as a New York performance in February), and it was an auspicious sign for him: he’d just moved with his family to suburban Glenview, where his wife works as a doctor, to begin an open-ended residency with Eighth Blackbird at the University of Chicago....

EVERYTHING WILL BE OK ★★★★> WHERE Music Box, 3733 N. Southport Since the 1920s, the sheer amount of labor required to do animation well has shaped the genre, pushing it toward family-friendly material that can sell tickets and cover payrolls. But when you like to draw pictures of people being sawed in half vertically, you have to rely on your own resources. Hertzfeldt’s earliest films have all the delight of a schoolboy’s doodle, with heavy dollops of black humor and extreme violence rendered in simple black lines and judiciously applied spot color....

For about a year and a half three native Argentines have been operating the catering and delivery service 5411 Empanadas (5411empanadas.com), named for the country’s international area code. Now the team’s poised to start a food truck. They’re awaiting inspection and hope to hit the streets beginning on Valentine’s Day. Co-owner Nicolás Ibarzabal says that they’re also looking for a retail space. Currently there’s a minimum order of 24 at $1....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Over the summer you could take a drive through the south and west sides and see folks on sidewalks and in the streets doing their take on bop, the intuitive and playful dance style born on the west side that many local rappers have embraced with some sunny, melodic tracks. While the dip in temperature has made it harder to bop outdoors (or at least far more unpleasant) there are still places to go and bop, or at least see other people do it—for example, on Friday the Olympic Theatre in Cicero is hosting what’s being billed as the first annual Thanksgiving Bop-a-Thon....

Aosoth, IV: Arrow in Heart (Agonia) French black-metal adepts Aosoth traffic in sinister gnosticism—they sound as though they’ve excavated the sort of secret knowledge that deranges saints. Taut sheets of nauseating dissonance are freighted with a clotted, tarry bass tone and distended by gusts of tortured howling, and the grinding guitars sometimes cycle past each other like the wheels of a huge combination lock that never opens. The long songs are methodical and patient, but there’s nothing soothingly organic about their metabolism—the straitjacketed hammering of the drums in particular tends to shift jarringly, like a ceremonial battalion executing parade-ground maneuvers....