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Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Kevin Warwick: Such a thinking man’s response. I’m going to just shut my brain off, because Sleigh Bells isn’t trying to stump me. I’ll agree that Reign of Terror was a bit of a step back from the megabeat, sparkly Treats, which has very little to dissect other than the fact that it’s xxxtreme party pop, or “shred pop” (a genre I didn’t know existed until Rolling Stone dropped it in describing the duo)....

The local media community is abuzz about the NYT piece on the Tribune Company. Shocking! Must-read! I guess, but its value is more gathering what’s already known (aside from a handful of seamy new accusations) and laying it out as an indictment. Anyone who’s been following the saga will be unsurprised to learn that: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The deal was a mess, and the bankruptcy is a clusterfuck* Randy Michaels has long been dogged by allegations of boorish behavior* Lee Abrams writes weird memos* The new leadership has a penchant for unfunny PR releases* The relationship between Zell, Blago, and the Wrigley deal is strange but still really opaque* That whole thing about anchorless news, the less said the better* The executive bonuses are really infuriating* The poker game , which was admittedly déclassé but strikes me as being pretty minor in the grand scheme of things * The advertorial-style wraps piss people off Granted, it’s from anonymous sources with a lot of skin in the game, but it’s at least plausible....

Consistency isn’t the most glamorous quality in a rock musician–lots of fans, myself included, are more likely to get weak-kneed over reckless experimentation. But there’s a certain quiet pleasure in following an artist as he patiently refines a sound. Over the past seven and a half years Ted Leo–aided by his astoundingly good backing band, the Pharmacists–has established himself as a master craftsman of punked-up political pop, which he seasons with bits of Thin Lizzy, the Pogues, and 70s reggae....

Taiko is remarkable for its emphasis on the entire body. Performers set their legs in wide stances to strike oversize drums, but even at rest they’re tense, like human metronomes ticking on mute. This energetic physical engagement situates taiko as dance—and it’s a key point of technique for the musician Tatsu Aoki and his group, Tsukasa Taiko, now in their tenth year of an annual showcase at the Museum for Contemporary Art....

Cataclysmic climate change, economic collapse, apocalyptic war . . . these are the challenges facing the characters in Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, now receiving a beautifully molded production at the Artistic Home. First presented on Broadway in October 1942, just ten months after Pearl Harbor, this Pulitzer Prize-winning proto-absurdist comedy about the uncertain fate of the human race “was written on the eve of our entrance into the war and under strong emotion,” Wilder said, “and I think it mostly comes alive under conditions of crisis....

Annabel Mehran Camus wrote that there is only one truly serious philosophical question—and that is suicide. “Judging whether or not life is worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy,” he writes in The Myth of Sisyphus. Those words were the first thing that came to mind when I saw the photo spread that Vice Magazine removed from its website today. Entitled “Last Words,” the spread is part of VICE’s Women in Fiction issue, which is dedicated entirely to female writers and artists....

Every four years a president is elected and someone like me excoriates the press corps covering the election for failing to focus on the big issues that should have mattered. This year is different. This year’s big issue is the economy, and no one’s going to overlook it. But major resources still need to be devoted to the fringes. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Akin’s faux pas got a lot of media attention, though too little of it pushed past Akin himself to the hypocrisy of the Republicans who tried to throw him off the back of the wagon....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Others, however, have been more critical, expressing skepticism that what has been proclaimed the best fried chicken in the city by food media would turn out to be, as they put it harshly, “chicken fingers.” I don’t think that’s fair—chicken fingers are a frozen mass-produced product, and Honey Butter buys locally raised chicken and butchers and brines them themselves each day—but it is true that “artisanal chicken” and “boneless” don’t tend to go together....

Last week Chicago production duo the-Drum released their debut album Contact, which finds them largely abandoning the avant-R&B sound that first brought them attention in favor of a much more abstract, less structured approach that sounds like the score to a supercool 90s cyberpunk movie that I wish actually existed. You can stream the album here. Fans of the pair’s old sound who don’t feel like accompanying them on eight-minute instrumental excursions needn’t despair, though—they’re still making poppier stuff for acts like JODY and the rapper Kit, who’s tapped them for beats before, and who recently posted to SoundCloud a track called “Profit Prophet” produced by the-Drum cofounder Jeremiah Chrome, uncharacteristically credited here as Jeremiah Meece....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Even if you believe the NIV is the infallible word of God, it’s still bad theology. All God’s saying is that he’s not going to wipe out all living creatures, even if they really have it coming—He’s still pretty explicit about how horrible mankind is—not that he’s going to keep us from submerging Vanuatu. (He also didn’t say He wouldn’t stop fucking with us; just ask the Sodomites or Lot’s wife....

QI want to buy my 14-year-old niece a dildo, some lube, and an age-appropriate book about sex. (Can you recommend one?) I have her mother’s permission, but I wanted to double-check on whether there are legal issues I should be concerned about. (I live in Oregon.) Do you think it would be inappropriate for me to cross that boundary with my niece? I figure it would be less awkward to get these items from me than from her mother, and I would include a thoughtful letter on love, sex, and life with the promise that I will never bring the “gift” up, but that I will always be happy to talk if she wants to....

Ben Schiller On Saturday, barman Ben Schiller put in notice with the Boka Restaurant Group, for whom he’s overseen the cocktails at the flagship, GT Fish & Oyster, and Girl & the Goat since 2009, after making his name at In Fine Spirits. He’s signed on with the Fifty/50 Restaurant Group as a partner in the Berkshire Room, the forthcoming craft cocktail lounge in the new Acme Hotel, in River North, and will be helping out at Homestead, the farm-to-table restaurant above Roots Handmade Pizza....

Good ol’ Billy Shakes—just the mention of his name sends many spiraling back to high school English class. Since 2005, the Improvised Shakespeare Company has found a way to slash the bard’s intimidation factor—and poke fun at it, too. Unlike the chest-puffed reenactments that plague a lot of loft stages, their interpretation is simple and painless. A (probably drunk) audience member throws out an original title for a play, and then a group of six or so weaves a side-splitting story around it....

Kaplan’s Liquors 960 W. 31st 773-890-0588 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » lotto, package goods, and love reads the sign in the window, and if you kept your eyes level while popping in for a six-pack and some lottery tickets, this would feel like just another well-preserved, tin-ceilinged, old-school Bridgeport bar. But stay a while, sipping your Old Style, and you might get the feeling you’re not alone....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Boulud is chairman of the U.S. team, while Bartolotta serves on its board of culinary advisers, and both come by their interest sincerely—they both worked for Paul Bocuse in Lyon, France, in the 1980s. Some in the food world question whether the Bocuse d’Or and a culinary world that revolves around France really ought to matter to international chefs today, but they still take it for granted that classic French technique, as modernized by Bocuse and other nouvelle cuisine chefs since the 1970s, is the heart of modern refined cooking and a worthy aspiration for chefs anywhere....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Five years ago the Oxford American, a quarterly publication that dubs itself the “southern magazine of good writing,” published a special issue on southern movies. It did so well that they’ve just brought out a sequel. Though I contributed to the previous issue I didn’t propose anything this time round, but now that I have the follow-up in front of me I find I can recommend it for a couple of things....

If YouTube had been around in the late 80s, Colin Quinn might have been a bigger star. His antics as cohost of MTV’s Remote Control and his LL Cool J parody video, Going Back to Brooklyn, were ripe for repeat viewings. By the late 90s Quinn had found a wider audience as the anchor of SNL’s “Weekend Update,” but despite his broader success, the Brooklyn-born comedian remains a staple on the New York stand-up scene....

LeAlan Jones rushes onto the West Chatham Park practice football field and shoves his right outside linebacker: “Why are you waiting for him to come to you?” he demands, then shows the young man how it’s done, squatting into the stance of a linebacker like a velociraptor ready to spring. Yet he’s a factor in the race, and a trouble spot for Giannoulias in particular. A Chicago Tribune/WGN poll this week showed Kirk leading Giannoulias 44 percent to 41 percent—with Jones getting 5 percent....

The Secret History of Chicago Music, a gorgeous and informative strip written and drawn by Steve Krakow (aka Plastic Crimewave), has been a regular part of the Reader for more than five years. Now it’s breaking into the world of fine art with a month-long exhibit at the MCA, part of the museum’s 12 x 12 New Artists/New Work series (which recently featured White/Light’s sound installation). A selection of the 8....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Except it’s not about “need” and never really has been. More a matter of desire, since sometimes it just feels good to rev up and spew—or rev up and trickle if the words don’t come, which is all too frequently the case. Yet somehow there’s always an excuse to blabber on—sound, rhythm, free association, archaism, all manner of performative indulgence, none of which has anything to do with raw necessity or use....