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Victor Parris Mitchell rifling through records in Ray Barney’s basement When Ray Barney told me the leftover inventory from his old label, Dance Mania, had been gathering dust in his basement since the dance imprint shut down in 2001, I knew I had to get down there and see it for myself. As I wrote in this week’s B Side feature, Victor Parris Mitchell, a producer who released several records on Barney’s label, and Barney himself are relaunching Dance Mania—and they’re doing so partially because the imprint’s old catalog is in high demand....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The photo was taken by David Chidley of the Canadian Press outside the Dirksen Building last July as Black arrived for a day of the trial that led to him serving six and a half years in a Florida prison for fraud and obstruction of justice. No, it’s not a remarkable picture, and unless we take eyewitness testimony into account we can’t even be certain that Black wasn’t making some other sort of gesture....

Death by a Thousand Cuts Some might find the conclusion of an Associate Dean/Researcher of Journalism that “Newspapers need more journalists!” startling. It is actually fairly predictable. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As paper publications shrink (including this one) it obviously does not mean that less journalism is the result. The recent calamity in Iran couldn’t be completely silenced as many brave Iranians tweeted, posted, and blogged to the world, eager for information....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This seems like it would interfere with Steinberg’s appraisal of McCain as “a genuine war hero with the courage of his convictions. . . . the one man on the Republican bench who stands a chance of becoming a president we could all be proud of.” Now, most of the people I am proud of would run screaming from a person who openly defended Angolan terrorist Jonas Savimbi, mostly because he was paid handsomely to....

The two quickly turned to discussing the hottest topic in local politics: their defeat by political novice Anita Alvarez. They agreed it wasn’t the shocker pundits and journalists have been calling it. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Allen nodded. “And then she got on TV.” It’s easy to say it after the fact, but they aren’t the only people involved in the state’s attorney campaign offering this analysis....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’m a frequent contributor to Rouge, so I hope nobody thinks I’m tooting my own horn if I come right out and say that I regard it as the best film magazine going that’s exclusively online. It’s been around since 2002, and it happens to be based in Australia, but you might not even notice this if you were scanning the table of contents of any issue, because it’s far and away the most international of film magazines in English....

When Lilly McElroy posted her ad on Craigslist, she was very specific about what she was looking for in a man. She wanted someone tall, someone sturdy, someone who wouldn’t duck or stumble if she gathered the force of her five-foot-three, 135-pound frame and threw herself headlong at him. In a month’s time she got about 30 replies. She set up a few dates and always brought along a friend....

thursday29 Thursday29 Tortoise 2.0Zomes Friday30 Tift Merritt Saturday31 Mwata Bowden EnsembleCultsLightning Swords of DeathNight BeatsAndrew W.K. Sunday1 Night BeatsAram Shelton Quartet Tuesday3 Seu Jorge & Almaz Wednesday4 Bob Log III ZOMES The bio accompanying Zomes’ self-titled album on Holy Mountain claims that the band’s sole member, Asa Osborne, uses a human tooth as a guitar pick. It’s the kind of one-sheet tidbit that you just know is too perfect to be true, but Osborne’s former gig as guitar god for Lungfish—a band devoted to transcending all sorts of musical and nonmusical conventions—makes it kinda believable....

Shining City Goodman Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Set in contemporary Dublin, the play focuses on two men, Ian and John (two versions of the same name). Ian, a thirtysomething ex-priest, has just traded in the confessor’s booth for the counselor’s couch and set up shop as a therapist. (Santo Loquasto’s set, lit by Christopher Akerlind, evokes a dreary third-floor office in a dilapidated Victorian building; a high window provides a view of the Dublin skyline....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Anyway, re Sturges and my previously related difficulties with his high-period, you’ll excuse the language, “comedies”—that the laughs are obvious and underlined, that the performers are like programmed robots, spewing out cookie-cutter bons mots with hardly a trace of naturalistic empathy or self-reflection (“They gave me these lines so I say ’em”—that kind of professionalized artifice by rote)—is there really any hope for such a sorry, sorry case (i....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Early in the group’s 14-year career, Jon Langford explained that he saw the Waco Brothers as a bar band that would let him bash out loud rock ‘n’ roll on a regular basis. For many years that’s just what the Wacos did, becoming one of Chicago’s most dependable (and drunken) live acts. But it’s been ages since they’ve been scene fixtures, since original drummer Steve Goulding moved to New York long ago (Joe Camarillo subs when Goulding can’t make a gig) and other members have committed themselves to nonmusical careers–singer and guitarist Dean Schlabowske, for instance, opened the Wicker Park wine shop Cellar Rat a couple years back....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Veteran Texas troubadour Ray Wylie Hubbard hasn’t mellowed a bit with age—in fact he and his grizzled, raspy voice seem to get more primal as the years pass. On his awkwardly titled 2010 album A. Enlightenment B. Endarkenment (Hint: There Is No C) (Bordello) he celebrates the blues (“I say that Muddy Waters is as deep as William Blake”) as well as the instinctive impulse to make noise (“Pots and Pans” blurs the line between sounds made by musical instruments and those from a woman in the throes of orgasm)....

Tierecke/Wikimedia Commons Depeche Mode I hoped that I could write about Daft Punk‘s new single for today’s 12 O’Clock Track, as some reports indicated that I might be able to hear it by now. But alas, much to my disappointment, it’s 10 AM on Friday and there’s still no sign of the French duo’s new, presumably dazzling song. But a new Depeche Mode single will do, something just as silly, if on the other end of the emotional spectrum....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » No matter how many years I spend digging for new sounds, I can still get hit sideways with something unexpected. Lots of countries on this side of the Atlantic have rich musical traditions associated with Carnaval, and I recently discovered that Venezuela is no exception. La Sardina de Naiguatá, led by trumpeter Ricardo Diaz, hail from the Caribbean coastal town of Naiguatá and play a modified modern version of the festival music called parranda, using both brass and electrified instruments (originally parranda groups featured just hand percussion and a cuatro)....

In August 1952, when John Cage premiered his landmark composition 4’33”, the guy who sat at the piano occasionally turning a page but never hitting any keys was David Tudor. An avant-garde pianist and experimental composer born in Philadelphia in 1926, Tudor is inextricably linked to Cage—he performed the premiere of just about every piano piece the older man wrote in the 50s and early 60s. He was also a key collaborator of many of Cage’s peers from the New York School of the 50s, such as Morton Feldman,...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The ecologically minded public would be assured that Canada is not running out of trees. I’ve kept this idea in the back of my head with the other detritus because crises spawn hallucinations, and the newspaper business seems to be in end-stage crisis. The company that owns the Tribune is in bankruptcy. The company that owns the Reader is in bankruptcy....

The idea for announcing track meets came to Billy Poole-Harris on a whim. “I was at a meet at Proviso West, and I decided to announce the meet because no one else was doing it. I’ve been announcing ever since.” An assistant special education teacher and the boys’ cross-country coach at Whitney Young high school, Poole-Harris announces dozens of meets throughout the area—including the state high school championships. He graduated from Oak Park and River Forest High School in 2002, where he ran cross-country and the 3,200-meter....

DANCE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There are lots of great Chicago choreographers with longer track records of ambitious and challenging—if uneven—work. Among these brave, intelligent souls, who do their own thing and do it well, are Shirley Mordine, Billy Siegenfeld of Jump Rhythm Jazz Project, Breakbone DanceCo.’s Atalee Judy, Carrie Hanson of the Seldoms, and Julia Rhoads, who broke through to a new level of brainy comedy in Lucky Plush’s Cinderbox 18 last fall....

The Reader’s Choice: Chicago Music Exchange Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A strange sort of masochism seems to drive broke-ass musicians to take two buses and a train across town just to stew in unrequited gear lust at Chicago Music Exchange, where most of the hundreds of gorgeous vintage guitars lining the walls are so far out of the price range of the average player that they might as well be behind credit-card-proof force fields....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There’s been quite a bit of discussion about how many former Clinton appointees will be in the Obama White House. To an extent it’s inevitable–Bill was president for eight years, so obviously many qualified Democrats will have gotten their qualifications during the previous Democratic administration. But I still think it’s a terrible mistake, because of all the hardcore crazy America will have to suffer through from the New York Times....