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When people talk about Chicago’s history of fiercely independent record labels, they usually bring up Touch and Go, Drag City, and Thrill Jockey. It’s too bad that Kranky Records, which celebrates its 20th anniversary in 2013, doesn’t come to mind more often, because it certainly belongs in that company—it’s proved just as reliable, creative, and uncompromising as any of those better-known imprints. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Joel Leoschke and Bruce Adams launched Kranky in 1993 to release Prazision, the debut from Virginia instrumental trio Labradford, who went on to be a cornerstone of the label’s early output....

Of all the Chicago stand-up comics who’ve emigrated to the coasts in recent years, Michael Palascak has yet to achieve the sort of mainstream success of someone like Hannibal Buress or John Mulaney. It doesn’t have anything to do with his material. Palascak has perhaps spent more time on the road (and thus in relative obscurity) than other Chicago ex-pats, honing his act in venues across the country. As such, he’s become the ideal club comic: someone who works in admittedly innocuous, PG-13 territory yet retains a strong command of both his craft and persona....

The R. Kelly trial is finally scheduled to begin May 9, more than six years after the Sun-Times received and turned over to police a videotape that reportedly shows the singer having sex with and urinating on an underage girl. The day the Sun-Times broke that story Kelly sang “The World’s Greatest” at the opening ceremonies of the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The pretrial maneuvering is another mystery....

In the mid-90s Gosia Pieniazek was waiting tables at Sophie’s Busy Bee, the last Polish restaurant in the immediate orbit of the rapidly gentrifying intersection of Damen, North, and Milwaukee. A recent immigrant, she’d left northern Poland in 1993, at age 19, which makes her old enough to remember the culinary privation of life behind the Iron Curtain. Lokal’s pierogi are light and silky and dressed in a creamy bourbon-date sauce that Wnorowski came up with at home while perusing the booze left over from a party....

A few weeks ago when Frontier chef Brian Jupiter and his crew carried a whole barbecued lamb into the dining room, they got a mixed reaction. Then there’s Jupiter’s regular menu, which features barbecued rabbit with blackberry sauce, venison-black bean chili, pulled boar sandwiches, and braised elk shepherd’s pie (for the recipe see our blog the Food Chain). It’s easily the most game-focused collection of dishes in town. And though the chef admits his partners Mark Domitrovich and Dan McCarthy (who also own the Pony and Lottie’s) were going for a dude-centric customer base, he says he’s selling the wild animals to equal numbers of men and women....

During the preopening hype for Sunda, the new pan-Asian—excuse me, “New Asian”—preening ground from Billy Dec’s Rockit Ranch Productions, the company issued a full color vacation album of the Party Baron’s Big Adventure in Asia, featuring him nibbling scorpion sticks and chillaxin’ on the Great Wall with best bud Ross Geller. Dec evidently fancies himself Bourdain in a ballcap, or perhaps something even more iconic: the restaurant’s YouTube commercial frames him Christlike, backlit and with the whole world in his hands....

At the Drive-In, Relationship of Command LP (Twenty-first Chapter) This re­issue of At the Drive-In‘s magnum opus—first released in 2000 on the Beastie Boys’ long-defunct Grand Royal label—is an obvious result of the band’s popular yet short-lived 2011 reunion (or cash grab, depending on your perspective). A must-have for any early-aughts posthard­core fan, Relationship of Command is a moody, restless confluence of ragged guitar melodies and Cedric Bixler-Zavala’s powerful vocals, which are trippy but not yet Mars Volta trippy....

Minerva Studio/Shutterstock If you don’t read a lot of tech blogs you may not be aware that today marks the beginning of the weeklong rollout of something called the Copyright Alert System. But once it’s up and running—and causing pain in the asses of the many people who rely on peer-to-peer networks like BitTorrent for their entertainment content needs—we’re likely to hear a lot more about it. The CAS is a partnership between the major Internet service providers (like Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon) and content providers (like movie studios, record labels, and TV networks) that allows the latter to contact (and, in some circumstances, punish) users of those ISPs who they find to be uploading copyrighted content to P2P networks....

Kidz in the Hall’s new single—a synthy, effervescent reinvention of Special Ed’s 1989 semi-hit “I Got It Made”—earned the Chicago hip-hop duo a bit of buzz when it hit the Internet in mid-March, thanks in part to the recent crossover success of their second full-length, The In Crowd (Duck Down). If you’re listening closely to Naledge’s rhymes, you might catch references to “Pumps” and “Dee Browns,” and in the video—a professional-looking piece of work for a group that’s still mostly a blog darling, but not suspiciously slick—you might notice that the camera occasionally lingers for a split second on somebody’s Reeboks....

Dance music has long kept its gaze locked on the new—new sounds, new ways of combining them, and new methods of getting them out to audiences—but it’s not immune to the temptation to look over its shoulder from time to time. Brighton, England-based producer Jack Adams, aka Mumdance, has an obvious affinity for 90s shoegaze, which although technically a rock sound drew a considerable amount of inspiration from the burgeoning UK electronic scene of the time, as well as the kind of techno that Kevin Shields was soaking up back then....

Last fall the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago made national news when it announced its latest environmental initiative: the purchase of 30 electric cars that would be used to transport maintenance, engineering, and security staff around some of the district’s large treatment facilities. It was the single biggest acquisition of electric cars by any American governmental entity. “The District prides itself on protecting the environment and utilizing our resources in the best public interest,” board president Terry O’Brien said in a press release accompanying the announcement....

With deep red walls and red brocade chandeliers, cloistered alcoves outfitted with cushy sofas and sweeping fringe curtains, and an orchid on every plate, Between Boutique Cafe & Lounge seems designed to seal the deal. The sexy late-night lounge serves booze-spiked bubble teas and a menu of luxurious small plates created by chef Radhika Desai, former sous chef at Vermilion: Sweet Heat Shrimp was five juicy grilled crustaceans glazed with a tangy sauce of garlic, curry, and honey; the Between Green salad was an ample portion of mixed greens spiked with avocado, mushrooms, candied cashews, and caramelized onions....

Kanye West’s sixth album, Yeezus, leaked on Friday, and plenty of rap fans, pop critics, and Twitter users have had something to say about it almost immediately. Reader music critics Miles Raymer and Leor Galil recently hopped on Gchat to discuss their reactions to the record, the reactions to the reactions, and what they hope comes next. MR: Yeah, at this point I’m not even sure how many times I’ve listened through it, but it’s definitely a bunch....

Adapter R.L. Nesvet adds a feminist twist to the Alexandre Dumas tale of intrigue: in her version, the imprisoned masked figure is Louis XIV’s twin sister rather than twin brother. The first play in Babes With Blades’ program for the development of new works, Nesvet’s drama provides plenty of opportunities for swordplay, which the performers seize with zest and skill. But the weak script includes characters with no real function (the historical Duchess of Montpensier, a fictional Afro-Caribbean escaped slave), and it ends abruptly and enigmatically....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » First released in 1979, George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead remains the definitive filmic statement about American consumerism. Little needs to be said about the visual motif of brain-dead zombies swarming around a shopping mall; it’s a perfect metaphor for consumer culture at its worst. In the recurring image, shopping has been internalized to the level of base impulse, no longer attached to material need or even want—it’s simply what people do when they no longer have the power to think....

It was wall-to-wall bodies at the Chicago Architecture Foundation’s longtime digs in the Santa Fe Building last week, for the opening of its “Shanghai Transforming” exhibit—which prompted some thoughts about the upcoming transformation of the CAF itself, which has been growing like Shanghai. Last month its board got the final results of a feasibility study for a bricks-and-mortar Chicago Architecture Center, expected to be the first of its kind in the country....

I wasn’t able to make it to either of Eighth Blackbird’s recent performances at the Museum of Contemporary Art, where the program featured a couple of pieces from composer David Lang‘s recent recording Death Speaks (Cantaloupe). Singer Shara Worden (My Brightest Diamond), guitarist Bryce Dessner (the National), and pianist Nico Muhly all appear on the new album, a song cycle that imagines death as a character, with compositional inspiration coming from the work of Franz Schubert....

The city’s most reliable and adventurous showcase for jazz and improvised music returns for its eighth incarnation this week. The Umbrella Music Festival kicks off with a by-now-traditional mini fest, European Jazz Meets Chicago, at the Cultural Center on Wed 11/6 and Thu 11/7, where some of the finest talent from eight European countries will appear on three different stages, often side by side with top-notch locals. In previous years the Friday, Saturday, and Sunday concerts have been spread out among the three regular Umbrella Music venues: Elastic, which hosts improvised ­music on Thursdays; the Hideout, which hosts the Immediate Sound series on Wednesdays; and the Hungry Brain, which hosts the Transmission series on Sundays....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In 2010 Diplo’s Mad Decent label took its annual Block Party national—previously held only in Philly (Diplo’s adopted hometown), it branched out with installments in Chicago and a few other cities, where Mad Decent-signed and Mad Decent-approved acts slung the latest in forward-looking EDM and hip-hop at what looked sort of like small-town carnivals swarmed by streetwear-clad hipsters. This year the party takes place Sat 8/18 on Fulton between Ashland and Justine, and once again it’s free with RSVP....

Part of an occasional series of oral histories, as told to Anne Ford Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When I was seven years old, my grandmother introduced me to the game. I beat everybody in my family most of the time. Then, when I was 11 or 12, I happened to have a neighbor who was involved in competitive Scrabble. I would go over to his house on Monday nights, and he would just destroy me....