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Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Say you’re a computer-stuff company, one with an extraordinary-sounding product that can translate recorded speech from one language to another while retaining the original speaker’s voice. Maybe you see a potentially lucrative application of this product–the translation process is time consuming, so it wouldn’t be practical for face-to-face conversations across language barriers, but it could be used to tailor English-speaking American pop music for non-English-speaking markets....

Ian Schneller built his first musical instrument in 1986: a 30-by-32-inch kick drum for his band Shrimp Boat. The monster appears on the cover of the group’s 1991 collection Volume 1. “It would just barely fit through the doors of all the venues,” Schneller recalls. “But we’d always win over the sound operators. It was kind of a PR thing as much as it was an enormous kick drum.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Like many American teens of the 1970s, I met Richard Wagner at the movies, when Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall), the war-happy cavalry man in Apocalypse Now, plays “Ride of the Valkyries” over his helicopter radio during an assault on a Viet Cong village. “It scares the shit out of the slopes,” Kilgore informs Captain Willard (Martin Sheen). “My boys love it!” The swirling strings and valiant horns are the perfect accompaniment as the helicopter formation descends and the Americans machine-gun the villagers....

McPherson’s early plays were often driven by monologues–1997’s The Weir is his first ensemble piece. Still, it relies heavily on the actors’ abilities to make rambling tales seem simultaneously fresh and hardwired into the characters’ psyches. A rural Irish pub on a wet night provides the setting for an evening of ghost stories, which begin with fairies and end with real loss, told by four locals and a newly arrived Dublin woman....

Now that moving around big chunks of data has become so ridiculously fast, easy, and cheap, music’s entered a golden age of collaboration. Nowhere is this more apparent than in hip-hop, which has a well-documented predilection for guest appearances, team-ups, and other techniques for keeping fans engaged that it happens to share with superhero comics. The fact that all a rapper needs now to jump on a track is a microphone, a laptop, and a wifi signal has only ramped up the intensity of that affection....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After reading that, I turned the page to Michael Hawthorne’s report (which began on page one and jumped inside) on the health hazards posed by Chicago’s ancient lead pipes and water mains. The story ended dramatically. A lead expert who’d studied the problem for the EPA said it’s so huge, not just here but in cities across America, that utilities and state governments hate to acknowledge it....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The bad news: “It’s no secret that the newspaper industry is in rough shape,” the Media Group told shareholders. “Our industry’s advertising revenues are being depressed by the significant declines in the industries that are most important to us — housing, real estate, employment, autos and, increasingly, retail. Some of the issues affecting our advertising revenue are economic, while others are secular....

The conventional wisdom is that striding into the sheriff’s office with a reform agenda is a great political move—as long as you do it fast and then get out before the next ugly scandal comes to light and reveals just how deep the problems there are. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Over the last few months Dart has convinced quite a few of us that he might actually believe in that reform stuff, establishing himself as a law enforcement populist with his own talent for generating publicity....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » He interviewed some heavy-hitters in the local jazz scene—Lauren Deutsch, executive director of the Jazz Institute of Chicago, Jason Koransky, editor of Down Beat—who admitted that they don’t actually listen to jazz on the radio, and then interviewed his 17-year-old son and a few of his friends, who said they prefer listening to music on the Internet and their iPods....

Alan Lomax It’s been a few weeks since Yeezus started popping wheelies on the zeitgeist and I still have yet to see a cogent negative review of it. There are a lot of people who don’t like the record, but most of the attempts at taking it down consist of little more than ad hominem attacks on Kanye for being an unbearable egomaniac, with his own lyrics submitted as evidence....

I’ve speculated that one of the reasons Chicagoans tolerate mediocre to terrible local governance is that, well, we’re not Detroit (whether governance has anything to do with that is a separate matter). Along those lines, here’s a Toquevillian look at Detroit by two Frenchmen; it’s a little old, but still interesting. They mention one of the few good things that’s come from the city’s collapse: the Heidelberg Project, a remarkable combination of outsider art, urban critique, and grassroots renewal that’s celebrating its 20th anniversary (with a book, among other things) this year and puts even Chicago’s impressive public art to shame....

You’d never guess from the mushy trailer, but this debut feature by Alex Kurtzman tackles a knotty family situation with intelligence and compassion. A corporate hustler estranged from his parents (Chris Pine) reluctantly returns to Los Angeles after the death of his father, a lionized record producer, and discovers that the old man had a secret second family; when the son tracks down his half sister (Elizabeth Banks), a single mother and recovering alcoholic, he can’t bear to identify himself, and their growing friendship veers uncomfortably close to romance....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I can’t remember the last time I was as excited for an album to come out as I am about Erykah Badu‘s New Amerykah, due in late February, but I suspect it was sometime in the 90s. I’m actually so pumped it’s making me kind of anxious–I’m afraid this record’s going to burn me like Alien: Resurrection, which I was convinced would be the best movie ever made but turned out to be, well, not....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For media junkies, there’s no more essential filmmaker working today than Errol Morris—his Abu Ghraib documentary Standard Operating Procedure looked past the immediate horror of the international scandal to ponder the way images become news, politics, and ultimately history; and his photography criticism for the New York Times urges readers to think about how the camera can be as subjective as the written word....

The Reader’s Choice: Fox & Obel Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You can’t talk about the best bread in Chicago without mentioning L20’s bread service—it’s phenomenal, and if you can still afford a night out at L2O, enjoy! For the rest of us, there’s Fox & Obel. The breads are handmade multiple times a day by expert bakers who fashion each loaf from an aged sourdough mother and organic flour—no commercial yeast is ever used....

Mayor Rahm Emanuel keeps telling us that Chicago’s school system is too broke to adequately fund the schools it already has, but that hasn’t stopped him from gearing up to open as many as 21 new charter schools in the next two years. Folks, this is a championship bout. Mihalopoulos’s determination to force UNO to reveal how it’s spent tens of millions of public dollars is matched only by UNO’s determination to keep that information secret....

Peter Yuen has barely begun to set up his workstation for practice, but his digital metronome is already nagging. Where others might hear an innocuous if somewhat annoying ticking, Yuen detects something more personal. “‘Are you done yet? Are you done yet? Are you done yet?’ That’s what I hear,” he says. And the answer is no, no, no. But that’s why Yuen bought the metronome at a guitar store—he needs it to help him set a quick pace in the kitchen....

The first local run of this franchised independent fest (“Different films. Different cities. Same mission”) features 18 films screening at the Music Box (3733 N. Southport), most Chicago or world premieres. Among the Chicago-centric fare: Geoff Harkness’s I Am Hip Hop: The Chicago Hip Hop Documentary (2008), which draws on 130 interviews and more than 500 videotaped concerts and features performers including Yea Big, Kid Static, and Verbal Kent (Sun 9/20, 8:30 PM); and The Providence Effect, which profiles Chicago private school Providence St....

Aimee Levitt All the tacos, part one There are many things wrong with Bodega, starting with the name. A bodega is a store. More specifically, it is a store that sells very basic necessities, plus Virgin of Guadalupe candles, for cheap. I’m sorry if you know this already. The people who named Bodega the restaurant maybe do not, or they just decided to go with something that sounds randomly Mexican....

This wolf was tickled to hear that the headliners at this year’s Pitchfork Music Festival will be Belle & Sebastian, Bjork, and R. Kelly. Pitchfork will soon announce the rest of the lineup, but before that happens, Gossip Wolf has some more guesses: Australian psych-rockers Tame Impala, Toronto “Noh-wave” troupe Yamantaka//Sonic Titan, New Jersey rippers Screaming Females, and beloved 90s alt-rock band the Breeders. Oh, and a dark-horse pick that’s mostly wishful thinking: postmetal progenitors Neurosis....