BR. DANIELSON 7/30, EMPTY BOTTLE “Brother Danielson” is Daniel Smith, leader of offbeat Christian indie rockers the Danielson Famile, and his new Brother Is to Son (Secretly Canadian) has a lot in common with the Famile’s output: he continues to favor his squawky falsetto, and his earnest, gracefully demented pop sounds like it’s struggling to go in three different melodic directions at once. But Smith’s stuff seems downright minimalist next to the cacophonous frenzy of the full band, which is often seven strong and sounds more like fourteen....

Since the first reports of Chicago police torture surfaced a quarter century ago the list has swelled to nearly 200 cases involving dozens of public employees—and still no one has been prosecuted. Now, with the results of a four-year, multimillion dollar investigation due any day, here’s a guide by staff reporter John Conroy to the key figures in the scandal. Some of them may look familiar. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “The human population probably reached a maximum of about 3,000, perhaps a bit higher, around 1350 AD and remained fairly stable until the arrival of Europeans,” Hunt writes. “The environmental limitations of Rapa Nui would have kept the population from growing much larger [as previously thought]. By the time Roggeveen arrived in 1722, most of the island’s trees were gone, but deforestation did not trigger societal collapse, as Diamond and others have argued....

Presented by Facets Cinematheque and French Cultural Services in Chicago, this festival of recent French features runs Friday, December 2, through Sunday, December 11, at Facets Cinematheque, 1517 W. Fullerton. Following is the schedule through Thursday, December 8; a full schedule is available online at www.chicagoreader.com. For more information call 773-281-4114. Unless otherwise noted, all films are in French with subtitles. R Violent Days Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Rock and Roll: Impatience DOG When uptown presenters showcase downtown performers, the results usually resemble the faux boho of Rent, exuding the odor of investors’ money rather than artists’ sweat. But Performing Arts Chicago’s second annual PAC/edge Festival, a five-week affair that includes the city’s most progressive performing artists, still smells of little but perspiration–or stale urine in the case of Sandra Binion’s lyrical video installation, Watercloset(s), in the Athenaeum Theatre’s second-floor restrooms....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For most of the last decade Jazz Festival weekend has meant one thing at Fred Anderson’s Velvet Lounge: the annual appearance of New Orleans saxophonist Kidd Jordan. Hurricane Katrina changed that last year, though–Jordan was one of thousands left homeless due to the tragedy. But he returns to Chicago on Friday and Saturday, a few weeks before the Jazz Festival, to spar with his old chum Anderson for the grand opening of the new Velvet Lounge....

In the past I’ve been a little lenient with Les Georges Leningrad: though they weren’t always quite spazzy or spunky enough for me, I forgave them because they claimed a ghost as a band member and sang in made-up languages. But the new Sangue Puro (Tomlab) is a record I can get behind 100 percent–it’s hysterical and evil, like a slumber party of 13-year-old girls sneaking out to TP the class nerd’s house....

Uncle Fun in Lakeview has long been the place to go for stink bombs, mini harmonicas, dashboard hula dancers, and John Wayne paper dolls. But this weekend the toy store’s upstairs gallery will feature a different set of oddities–zinesters, poets, bloggers, and progressive punk publishers–in a reading hosted by Uncle Fun employee Billy Roberts, who publishes the zines Proof I Exist and Her. It’ll be the first live performance event in the store’s 13-year history....

Metal bands all want to have the heaviest riffs, the heaviest drumming, and the heaviest amps, but lots of these guys seem to have forgotten about the power of a great vocalist, opting instead for the usual Cookie Monster gargling and cat-scratch screeching. Brooklyn’s Made out of Babies has a secret weapon in the metal arms race: a squeaky girl who sings like she needs a straitjacket. Julie (no last names here) sells her dangerous-nutwoman act with conviction, using a dozen different creepy-kid voices–she could record a radio play of V....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The members of the Anat Cohen Quartet are part of a dynamic circle of broad-minded players who’ve been kicking around for a decade or so but only emerged as a force in the last couple years. Many of them, including Avital and clarinetist Cohen, are from Israel, but others hail from Latin and South America and other locales. For example, hot-shit guitarist Lionel Loueke, who plays Symphony Center tomorrow night with Herbie Hancock, is from Benin....

Fred Halliday of the London School of Economics still wants to see a planned society that promotes equality, but he can’t stomach what passes for leftism these days. The money quote, from a long interview conducted with Danny Postel last November in Chicago: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “The antiglobalization movement has taken over a critique of capitalism without, to a minimal degree, reflecting on what actually happened in the 20th century....

Ouest Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » American women are always trying to suss out the secret of French style. Many imagine it’s inaccessible to the likes of us, a collective memory built by generations of women passing down carefully guarded sartorial techniques to their daughters. But one obvious aspect of Gallic chic is the understanding that you don’t have to let it all hang out to look alluring....

You know how when you first meet someone when they’re a teenager, you can only ever think of them as being 14? And then whenever they accomplish something grown-up you say stuff like “Oh my God, I remember when you got your learner’s permit” or “It seems like just yesterday you were still a virgin!” For years this Minneapolis four-piece was known only to Twin Cities kids–everybody in the band was still in high school and they couldn’t tour....

British choreographer Richard Alston is obviously a follower of Apollo rather than Dionysus. During a videotaped lecture-demonstration, he talks exclusively about the intellectual influences on his work: sculptor Henry Moore, the English approach to architecture, and, when he choreographed Light Flooding Into Darkened Rooms, 17th-century lute playing and Dutch painting. An excerpt from a piece set to djembe music is purely formal, relating only to sound and not cultural associations–there’s no hint of African dance....

More than 200 postcard-size paintings of hearts, most of them red or pink, hang from strings in Beth Reitmeyer’s richly colorful installation With Love, part of a show with the same title opening tonight at Zg; hearts made of pipe cleaners cover the walls. Reitmeyer, some of whose other exhibits have involved giving her work away and who’s hoping here to “spread affection from one viewer to the next,” is inviting people to take one of the small paintings as a “valentine for a friend or loved one....

The City That Sometimes Actually Works Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The room had become a favorite spot for a diverse crew of lifters, most of them black men–everyone from cops to parolees just out of prison and living in one of several nearby halfway houses. “It was a community place,” says Hudson, a policy analyst for the state. “It was just a positive place for African-American men from divergent paths to come together....

Fabric and paper collagist Diana Guerrero-Macia sees her art as a form of play. Five or six years ago she realized that her current work stems partly from something she did for fun with her mom as a preteen. After watching the movie Yellow Submarine, the two of them made a quilt: her mom embroidered “All You Need Is Love” on it and added an applique copied from Diana’s yellow submarine drawing....

Take No Prisoners: The Bold Vision of Kira Muratova Born in 1934 in Romania to a Romanian mother and a Russian father, Muratova went to both Romanian and Russian schools, often hiding her Russian identity at the former and her Romanian identity at the latter. Her parents were both high-ranking communist officials, so she had a relatively privileged childhood. Though for most of her life she’s lived in the Ukrainian city of Odessa, her films are in Russian and said to be full of references to Russian literature....

Who Lives? Who Dies? Who Decides? Yet one paragraph earlier Kass had admitted, “I wouldn’t want to live that way. And I’m writing something down to inform my wife that if I am ever like that, they should let me die. But there was nothing in writing for Terri. And her parents want to care for her. Still, she’s being killed.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A more important reason for the debate is that the issue deserves it....

Can you find recycling on the Gold Coast? Mining pollution in Logan Square? A vegetarian restaurant in the far South Loop? Over the last seven years, Nadine Bopp’s students at the School of the Art Institute have. Their 21 neighborhood “green maps,” available on the school’s Web site, constitute one of the 400 registered projects in 51 countries that are officially part of the international Green Map System. Best of Chicago voting is live now....