The New Machine Remember the old-fashioned horse-race journalism that ignores platforms, trivializes issues, and marginalizes talented but underfunded underdogs while slavering over billionaire nincompoops? Terrible, but it was as much fun to read as the sports section. The other day some guy from the local ward office called asking for permission to plant a Claypool sign in my front yard. I wondered: Daley endorses Stroger, but how hard is anyone in the city working for him?...

Chicago 2007 The World Music Festival, which kicks off today and runs through Thursday, is a project of the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs–the mayor’s office helped get the fest off the ground in 1999, but it hasn’t been involved since 2000. No festival in Chicago has a broader lineup or represents more of the city’s diverse population–and this year, as usual, the WMF outdoes Viva! Chicago on its own turf, presenting music from Cuba, Argentina, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Portugal, Spain, and Brazil....

I just read the question in your online archive about whether Coca-Cola once contained cocaine, toward the end of which you mention the substitution years ago (before I was born, in fact) of high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) for sugar in Coke. These days, HFCS is found in not just Coca-Cola but most sodas, candy, juices, sauces, ketchup, jelly, bread, yogurt, etc–it’s in everything. My boyfriend hates HFCS and goes out of his way to buy products that do not use it, which can be a bitch to find sometimes....

For better or worse, most of what’s sold to the West as world music is chosen by the white man. A lot of excellent albums get through that filter, both from traditional artists and acts that freely incorporate new technology and nonnative influences, though the filter itself has prompted an ongoing debate about authenticity. People on one side argue that the omnipresent West destroys ancient traditions, while others point out that nobody lives in a vacuum and that it’s natural for music to mutate....

Jon Langford has a lot of favorite Kevin Coyne stories. Like the one about how Elektra boss Jac Holzman called after Jim Morrison died to ask him to be the Doors’ new lead singer and Coyne turned him down, unimpressed by the band and put off by the idea of wearing leather pants. And the one about how Coyne refused an invitation from Richard Branson of Virgin to write lyrics for Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells on the grounds that the music was “total rubbish....

In 1995 photographer Mark DeBernardi became the manager of the custom printing house Lab One, on West Adams, and his annoyance with some of his clients helped him find his own style. “I was the front person for dealing with people who were unhappy with their prints,” he says. “We had photographers who had never printed and were looking for better prints than could be produced from their negatives. They would give me out-of-focus negatives and say, ‘Can’t you make them sharper?...

In Musician, Dan Kraus’s new documentary about saxophonist and clarinetist Ken Vandermark, there’s a moment when he sings an extraordinarily complex figure to his band–and then the film cuts to the band playing it back at him. Though Vandermark’s a veteran free improviser, “free” doesn’t mean “left up to chance”–even in solo performance, he always has a frame of reference. On Furniture Music (Okka Disk, 2003), his only solo recording, each piece has a dedication that suggests what that frame might be: It’s not hard to grasp the connection between the thick, gradually evolving bass-clarinet tones of “Color Fields to Darkness” and the paintings of Mark Rothko....

This past summer the average-size mother of a dwarf friend said to me, “This is an exciting time to be a dwarf.” She may have never had a stranger throw a coin into her coffee cup, but she was right. Many dwarfs, including me, were anxiously anticipating a minor trend of pop-cultural dwarf-positiveness. Then in December hundreds of dwarfs received an invitation to audition for a new reality series: The Littlest Groom, an Average Joe-type show from the Fox brain trust in which one male dwarf would look for love among 12 dwarf women and 3 of average size....

The forthcoming A Divided House (Unhinged) is the 12th album from singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Mark Edwards, better known as My Dad Is Dead, and it’s his strongest since the 1988 Homestead release Let’s Skip the Details–which was not just MDID’s masterpiece but one of the best records from a label that in the last half of the 80s seemed to put out something great every week. Divided House retains some of the hallmarks of MDID’s early sound–the suffocating atmosphere of Joy Division, the chiming arpeggios of the Smiths, the churning riffage of Killing Joke–and enlists the help of several of Edwards’s stalwart sidemen, including Scott Pickering and Chris Burgess, the erstwhile rhythm section of Prisonshake....

Filmmaker Therese Shechter usually waits a few dates before she tells men about her new autobiographical documentary, I Was a Teenage Feminist, which will be screened this weekend at Chicago Filmmakers. The video starts with a voice-over of Shechter saying she hadn’t thought about feminism in years. “What happened to my feminism and the power it gave me?” she asks. “Did I lose it, or did it lose me?” That’s followed by an interview with Shechter’s mother, then one with Ms....

I’m a high school girl with big problems. All my life I’ve worn boy clothes and had male friends, mainly because I’m into “male” things like video games and geek stuff. As high school approached, Mother Nature flipped me off with DD breasts and hips that would make Shakira jealous. Spear says there are three things that all transgender people need. “First, feeling loved, accepted, and understood,” says Spear. “Second, getting adequate support for exploration of gender experience, identity, and expression....

Even at their most relaxed and outgoing, the guys in Indian are still pretty fucking intimidating. When I walk into their practice space for our interview, they invite me to help myself to a Heineken from the well-stocked mini fridge by the door, but then guitarist Dylan O’Toole and bassist Ron Defries each sit down in a corner at the other end of the room, backed up against a head-high black wall of amplifiers....

Soundman Versus Flesh-Eating Bacteria Local labels, musicians, and clubs are rallying to the aid of Gary “Elvis” Schepers, who’s been at Swedish Covenant Hospital since December 11, fighting an infection in his left foot that at one point threatened to cost him his leg. Schepers, the part-time tuba player for Devil in a Woodpile, has made a living as a soundman since 1987. He’s worked steady gigs at Lounge Ax, the Cubby Bear, and the Empty Bottle, among other venues, and toured with local and regional favorites like Uncle Tupelo, Material Issue, and Eleventh Dream Day....

Fingers, James Toback’s 1978 debut feature about a second-generation gangster who plays classical piano, was described by Dave Kehr as “dauntingly personal filmmaking, full of strange, suggestive ideas and deep feelings that are never made comprehensible for the audience.” Despite the enthusiasm of everyone from Pauline Kael to Edgardo Cozarinsky and Francois Truffaut, I never liked Toback’s piece of macho braggadocio, so this remake by Jacques Audiard (Read My Lips) couldn’t go anywhere but up....

Our contested presidential elections are still being decided, 30 times per second, in Siebren Versteeg’s Nearly Half, Undecided, Balanced, Perfect, Dead. One of 11 software-based works by Versteeg at Rhona Hoffman, it consists of an LCD screen showing a U.S. map with each state colored red or blue–though a random-number generator makes the colors change quickly, while a bar at the bottom charts the rapidly fluctuating election results. When you wear the 3-D glasses available on a nearby shelf, the map flickers even more dynamically, bringing the viewer’s experience “back into the body,” Versteeg says....

Everyone is familiar with the idea of buried pirate treasure, and maps where “X marks the spot.” But is there any evidence of such a practice? Were there ever any pirate treasure maps as described? –Jimmy Breck-McKye, South Yorkshire, UK Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Did pirates ever bury treasure? It’d be strange if not–everyone else was doing it. For much of human history, if you had some covetable stuff you hoped to hang onto, couldn’t or didn’t want to put it in a bank or the equivalent, and owned a shovel, burial was Plan A....

Rock, Pop, Etc. ABI CRUZ Sat 3/6, 9 PM, Major Hall, 5660 W. Grand. 773-237-8089. BOB DYLAN Sold out. Fri 3/5, 8 PM, Aragon Ballroom, 1106 W. Lawrence. 312-666-6667 or 312-559-1212. Sat 3/6, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, 4746 N. Racine. 773-275-6800 or 312-559-1212. Sun 3/7, 8 PM, the Vic, 3145 N. Sheffield. 773-472-0449 or 312-559-1212. Mon 3/8, 8 PM, Park West, 322 W. Armitage. 773-929-5959 or 312-559-1212. GAELIC STORM Sat 3/6, 8 PM, Center for Performing Arts, Governors State University, Stuenkel Rd....

This muscular trio, led by Icelandic guitarist Hilmar Jensson and including drummer Jim Black and reedist Andrew D’Angelo, has always been up to its ears in rock and noise music. But the group goes for broke on the superb new Meg Nem Sa (Skirl), delivering concise, abrasive melodies behind Black’s Bonham-esque wallop. (The opening track isn’t called “Led Tyftelin” for nothing.) Jensson keeps busy tracing chord patterns, playing extended lines, and unleashing acidic torrents of noise, so it’s up to D’Angelo to play the tricky melodies, which he does with precision and a biting tone....

Voce Morta Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Originally called His Majestie’s Clerkes, the group was launched in 1982 by countertenor Richard Childress. He wanted to perform music of the Tudor period, and recruited professional singers who shared that interest, including Heider, a composer and music professor at Roosevelt University. When Childress left in ’89 to pursue his career in England, Heider took over. She led the group through the 90s, when audiences and money “rolled in,” and by ’95 was able to hire a part-time manager....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Some very sad news from late last week: Gary Graver, the cinematographer who virtually made the last third of Orson Welles’s filmography possible, died Thursday night of throat cancer. He’d been in the hospital since June, after shooting his last film, a short, in the south of France—work he characteristically insisted on doing, in spite of his poor health, out of friendship....