A boom box, just in case Since the summer of 2012, the four-person team at SIR Case (Suitcase in Rhythm) has been scavenging vintage suitcases—the kind that may have once been attached to 50s-era door-to-door salesmen—from antique shops and garage sales, subsequently gutting and repurposing them into functional boom boxes. The modernization makes the suitcases useless for transporting stuff, sure, but they were clunky and cumbersome to begin with, and you couldn’t plug an iPhone into one....

Welcome to the Chi, Mr. Superintendent. As I understand it, you’re everything mayor-elect Emanuel wants in a schools CEO—tough, brash, and eager to beat the crap out of teachers. Rock on! You see, in Chicago we’ve got this thing called the tax incrementing financing program, which diverts at least $250 million a year from the schools and turns it over to the mayor. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When it comes to being the big man at the school board, you’re pretty much free to do whatever you want—closing schools, firing teachers, rewriting curriculum, doling out contracts to your favorite charters—so long as you don’t touch the TIFs....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I spotted the latest exercise in Sunday’s New York Times. “Is the Game Over?—How baseball lost its place in American culture” announced the headline to the lead article in the Sunday Review section. The author, Jonathan Mahler, acknowledges up front that he’s making a tricky case, as Major League Baseball profits, over the past 20 years, “have grown from roughly $1 billion to nearly $8 billion....

The young man who met us at the front doors of Muhammad University of Islam wouldn’t let us in. He was polite yet firm when he told us they weren’t making bean pies that day. But my friends Peter Engler (eminent investigator of south-side culinary oddities) and Rob Lopata (occasional Reader contributor) had just toured the Nation of Islam’s neighboring Mosque Maryam a few days earlier, as part of the Chicago Architecture Foundation’s Open House Chicago....

A retired Chicago public school theater teacher, Mary Bonnett has spent the last several years writing, staging, and producing plays with her company, Her Story Theater. Their next production will be Shadow Town, which she says is “based on the interviewed lives of girls trafficked into the sex-slave trade.” Bonnett also produces readings that feature rappers, poets, novelists, journalists, and comedians of every age, race, and ethnic background. For the readings, she does it all: makes the posters, sends out invites, and selects the venues, which have included a beauty parlor....

“It was shocking,” write Yuval Taylor and Jake Austen in Darkest America: Black Minstrelsy From Slavery to Hip-Hop (W.W. Norton), “that in a city bursting with parade enthusiasts and curious tourists, a pair of European women who stayed less than an hour were the only white faces in the crowd other than ours.” The passage appears in a description of the Zulu parade at New Orleans’s Mardi Gras, one of the few contemporary events at which African-Americans wear blackface as a matter of course....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Paul Salopek of the Tribune–one of the country’s finest journalists–is nominated for his four-part series on oil, which is a masterpiece. The Trib‘s new media division also snagged a nomination for its Flash-based multimedia adaptation of the series. You may dismiss a story on the social pressure to excel at golf in the business world as lite. I wish I’d thought of it, because it’s great....

Big Theater’s reworked Uncle Vanya boasts plenty of invention and youthful energy—entirely at odds with the story’s essential melancholia. The actors playing Vanya and Astrov are too young, and they don’t do much physically to suggest they’re not. Director Ellie Heyman’s snappy expressionist lighting effects and environmental-theater touches make the most of the nontraditional space (a room with bookshelves), but they’re pretty arbitrary and introduce a tension contrary to the general air of desiccation....

In the popular mind, the front man of a rock band—the one who sings and in many cases writes the songs—is greedy for attention, drawn to the spotlight like a moth in leather pants. In the world of underground metal, though, it’s the opposite that’s often true. Many bands never play live, sometimes because their “front men” are the only members—California’s Xasthur, for instance, or Tasmania’s Striborg. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

During the holidays, it’s easy to get hung up on the small stresses of the season (too many social obligations, too much mandatory shopping, not enough pizza) and end up taking health, hearth, and family for granted. This week a few local artists and labels are doing good deeds for folks who are missing some or all of those things. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Chicago alt-country quintet Liza Day, named for their honey-voiced singer, have a summery sound and a serious early-70s Memphis classic-soul vibe on their 2012 EP, One for Courage....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The six-CD set includes liner notes by pianist Ethan Iverson, who criticizes some of the music’s imperfections—he doesn’t care for the cold digital sound or Bill Frisell’s guitar-synthesizer on the final two albums, Psalm and It Should’ve Happened a Long Time Ago—and clearly adores others. (I think any music critic can learn something from the way he doesn’t allow his analysis to undermine his fandom....

You know that statement Guru supposedly wrote before he died? The one where he bagged on his ex-partner DJ Premier and basically sounded like a complete ass? As I and a lot of other people suspected, it didn’t actually come from Guru. In a statement to the Source Guru’s sister, Patricia Elam, writes: “GURU was in a coma from mid February until his death and never regained consciousness.” Obviously this means he was in no shape to compose a weirdly vitriolic and petty-seeming good-bye letter....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Earlier this year I made a new friend who has either worked downtown longer or has learned to make downtown work better than I have, or both. She introduced me to a couple bars worth visiting in the Mag Mile vicinity. After I wrote about one for this year’s Best of Chicago issue, she took me to the other only with my assurance that I’d do nothing to let anyone else in on the secret....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Then Lindsay Beyerstein of Majikthise chimes in with the more general point that claims of “moderation” and “orthodoxy” can’t be taken at face value in any situation. Why should UCC members be called “moderate Christians,” as if they were watered-down alumni of Moody Bible Institute? “Claims of fundamentalism or orthodoxy are positioning statements for brands. We often treat claims of religious orthodoxy as if they were statements of fact rather than rhetorical devices....

In a culture where excess is ubiquitous, it’s easy to appreciate England’s Holly Golightly, a woman with a rare grasp of rock’s simple pleasures. For more than a decade she’s produced a steady stream of rootsy punk-driven rock, lending it a range and subtle pop sensibility that her one-time mentor Billy Childish could only dream of. It’s been almost three years since Slowly but Surely, her last and arguably most accessible album, but she’s finally dropping something new....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In honor of Pride Week, the Neo-Futurists present 30 Queer Plays in 60 Straight Minutes, a greatest-LGBTQ-hits collection drawn from the hundreds of two-minute plays written for their long-running show Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind. Reader intern Sharon Lurye advises audiences to expect the typical frenzied pace—plus lots more crossdressing than usual. Speaking of greatest hits, Dan Jakes recommends Time After Time, a Theo Ubique Cabaret Theatre revue offering some of the best work (both well-known and obscure) by Broadway songwriting legend Jule Styne....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There are numbers you toss around, numbers you think you can prove, and numbers that won’t confuse a jury. Back in August 2004, an internal investigation by Hollinger International concluded that deposed execs Conrad Black, David Radler, et al had stolen about $400 million from the company. But when the federal indictment came down a year later, Black and et al (Radler turned state’s evidence) were accused of swiping only about $84 million, and that, or some approximation, became the number in play in the media right up to the start of the trial....

Just about everything good to emerge from the miserable swamp of Chicago politics has some connection to the communities lodged roughly in the area between 43rd and 60th streets on the north and south and from the lake to Cottage Grove. It’s the birthplace of independent antipatronage politics and one of the few racially integrated neighborhoods in town. The area’s divided into two wards, the Fourth and the Fifth, so ambitious activists have twice as many opportunities to rise up the political ranks, and it’s home to the University of Chicago, which over the years has launched so many self-serving urban renewal projects and economic development schemes that the locals have gotten really smart about fighting them off....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Steve Erickson, longtime SF/fantasy novelist and film writer, is fond of the big alpha-omega statement, the kind of expansive, universalizing claim—”The movie is in all times, and all times are in the movie. . . . All scenes anticipate and reflect each other,” etc—that evaporates on inspection, and in Zeroville (Europa, 2007), his eighth long work of fiction, he’s frequently on the verge of swallowing his own rhetorical tail....

Matt Irie’s acrylic-on-panel works suggest Mondrian fed amphetamines and dropped into Tron. Irie’s solo show, “You Are the Vanishing Point,” consists mostly of paintings of intricate, overlapping grids that feel like they go on forever. That feeling derives sometimes from a painting’s size—his Super Croft, for example, is eight feet long and four feet high. But it also has to do with the sense that the edges of the images are arbitrary....