Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Some came in neon outfits emblazoned with slogans about molly or raging or some combination of the two, while others wore crisp white tank tops with the same catch phrases in neon rainbows. A few showed up in tie-dyed T-shirts (lots of Grateful Dead logos), and one intrepid attendee wore a tie-dyed button-up onesie. People caked their bodies in multicolored glitter; they dressed up like unicorns, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, nuns, and clowns; they dressed down in skimpy bathing suits or neon bras....

The Sony MiniDisc Last week Sony announced it’s producing its last MiniDisc components next month, marking the official end of the relationship between the technology megacorp and the format it launched in 1992 as a potential successor to the then-decade-old compact disc, which Sony co-owned with rival electronics giant Phillips. The MiniDisc consisted of a small magneto-optical disc contained in a cartridge that could hold over an hour’s worth of music, and which offered not only CD-quality playback but similar fidelity for recording and copying audio, making it a seemingly ideal format for a number of purposes....

[image-1] Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I don’t want to sound like an idiot, but sometimes there’s no help. Where has Susan Neiman been all my life? Alonzo Fyfe of Atheist Ethicist describes and links to this video (Session 6) of the Princeton-based author of Evil in Modern Thought speaking at last year’s “Beyond Belief” conference. The important division in the world today, Neiman argues, is not between believers and nonbelievers....

This week on the Bleader we’re running a series of posts on “Silence vs. Noise.” As a resident of Chicago, you’re probably intimately acquainted with the latter, though the former may seem like a quaint abstraction. Walk into any bar or restaurant and you’ll be assaulted with dance music or the blare of a sports channel or the bleating of someone’s unruly kid. Try to shush someone—even in a public library—and you’ll quickly discover that you’re the asshole, not the person making all the racket....

Last Wednesday was a typical day in the campaign to fill Rahm Emanuel’s vacant Fifth Congressional seat: I got mailings from three candidates blasting Cook County Board president Todd Stroger. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » He’s not even close. Offhand I can think of more than 30 other local politicians with more clout than Stroger, including three mere aldermen—Ed Burke, Richard Mell, and Fritchey’s uncle-in-law Bill Banks....

friday16 reginald r. robinson Chicago’s Reginald R. Robinson wasn’t kidding when he named his latest album Man out of Time (88 Playa Music): the guy’s in his early 30s and a staunch devotee of ragtime, a style that pretty much vanished from the American musical landscape generations before his birth. For three albums now, Robinson, the recipient of a 2004 MacArthur fellowship, has been unwilling to acknowledge any song written after the 1920s unless it’s one he came up with himself....

Chicago looms large in the mythos of Americana, but that’s just it: too often it’s myth, not reality. Mayor Daley—the relatively good one, not the dead one—may have railed against the city’s continued depiction as a gangland capital, and attempted to erase it by lining the avenues with bike lanes and flower planters. But Chicagoans, with our flair for bluster and bullshit, are all too eager to give French tourists and the like what they want: a little tough talk and a tommy-gun pantomime....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If I had to pick a defining segment of Joe Dante’s The Movie Orgy—which played to an elated full house at the Nightingale on Saturday—it would be the part that uses images of U.S. soldiers hunting giant locusts to illustrate a 60s pop song called “War Baby.” Occurring somewhere in the third or fourth hour (it’s hard to keep track), the sequence brings together two of Orgy‘s major subjects, 50s sci-fi and U....

Vegetation figures prominently in Yanira Castro’s 2011 Paradis, which is performed both inside and outside the Garfield Park Conservatory. But she’s no environmentalist; though plants make a gorgeous set, Castro homes in on the human, bringing artists and audiences into the same close space. Paradis seems to follow the arc of its inspiration, Jean-Luc Godard’s Notre Musique (2004), traveling from hell to heaven. When Paradis debuted at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Castro devoted the first third of the hour-long piece to a male soloist whose slow, stiff clockwork motions (in an indoor desert) suggested a well-aged Beckett character....

For at least the past decade European pop music has stayed constantly a few years ahead of America’s. The fact that Robyn is a massive star there and a cult act here has something to do with it, though whether that’s more of a cause or an effect is unclear. While American pop artists have finally picked up some of the experimental fervidity that their EU counterparts have been working with for a while now, but whether or not an act as quirky as the Danish duo Quadron can make it onto the charts here remains to be seen....

Next Tuesday the great Bay Area clarinetist Ben Goldberg will release two superb albums on his own BAG Productions imprint. Subatomic Particle Homesick Blues was actually cut back in 2008, soon after he met the popular saxophonist Joshua Redman on a double bill in San Francisco: the encounter eventually led to this session with trumpeter Ron Miles, drummer Ches Smith, and bassist (and former Chicagoan) Devin Hoff. The music bristles with contrapuntal arrangements that frequently find all three horn players improvising simultaneously, recalling the heyday of west coast jazz....

The Reader’s Choice: Club Foot Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The outdoor smoking area at Ukrainian Village standby Club Foot—a diamond-shaped corner stoop with a bucket of sand for butts—is humble compared to the lavish beer garden at nearby Happy Village, but it’s long on charm. It’s the kind of stoop that’s made for gossip, and alternately provides shelter in bad weather and a comfortable place to stand and chat in fair....

The Reader’s Choice: Fogo de Chao Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Rooted in the gaucho tradition, this gonzo meat circus brings the primordial experience of cooking animals on sticks over fire to the urban jungle that is River North. Accordingly, many patrons work themselves into a macho carnivorous frenzy, ignoring or dismissing what is surely one of the greatest salad bars in the universe, piled high with vegetables, cheeses, olives, salami, and smoked salmon....

I was walking along a path in the park last summer when I was hit in the back of the head by a small object. I yelped in surprise and turned just in time to see a black bird with a red-orange spot on each wing flying away. I’d been the victim of a fly-by pecking. After I got home, I googled “Chicago bird attacks” and found several articles about red-winged blackbirds dive-bombing people and animals; one from Time speculated that blackbirds in cities are more aggressive than their rural counterparts....

Former Light Pollution main man James Cicero has hit upon something special with his new solo project, Jimmy Whispers. He sings sincere songs about love and loss with just a chintzy organ recorded straight to an iPhone, and what the music lacks in fidelity it more than makes up for in unself-conscious heart, blissful melodies, and enchanting hooks. He’s finished an album, but you can’t get it just yet—a proper release is in the works....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A Cook County Juvenile Court judge has ordered Pitchfork to turn over the raw footage from an interview it conducted with lightning-rod local rapper Chief Keef at a New York gun range in June. Prosecutors asked last month for Pitchfork to surrender the footage so that the court could determine whether Keef had violated the terms of his probation, but Pitchfork protested, citing the First Amendment and the Illinois Reporter’s Privilege Act....

Shopping & Services Cobbler’s Rogers Park Shoe Repair In business for nearly 90 years, this repair shop services all types of shoes and boots as well as most leather items. aMon-Fri 8:30 AM-6 PM; Sat 8:30 AM-5 PM; Sun closed, 1424 W. Morse, 773-764-5906. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Evil Squirrel Comics This comic-book shop hosts card- and role-playing tournaments several days a week....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The alderman has accused Smith of claiming she helped workers when she was a corporate attorney for Navistar, a trucking company, when in fact she slashed retirement benefits. Then, over the last couple of weeks, the Daley campaign has claimed that several supporters found Smith staffers trading free beer for votes at a recent campaign event—and that Smith has changed her story to try to cover it up....

ERYKAH BADU NEW AMERYKAH PART TWO: RETURN OF THE ANKH (MOTOWN) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This is the second installment in Badu’s New Amerykah series. The outward-looking New Amerykah Part One: 4th World War, which she released in 2008 after a five-year absence, was a comeback record, largely made on her laptop—a huge departure from the big-budget production of her earlier albums. Personal and political, it represented Badu’s re-engagement with the social consciousness of hip-hop, which hip-hop itself seemed to have mislaid....

An ambitious new local cover band called Girl Group—which will play songs by 60s girl groups, natch—has 19 members so far, and it’s still growing. “I love 60s girl groups, but I’ve never heard of 60s girl groups that had all the instrumentalists be women,” says lead singer and main schemer Shana East. Girl Group’s lineup includes Hollows‘ Megan Kasten, Rabid Rabbit‘s Andrea Jablonski, Outer Minds‘ Gina Lira, Bobby Conn & the Burglars‘ Julie Pomerleau, Moonrises‘ Libby Ramer, and Chic-a-Go-Go host Mia Park....