his guy friday Despite his protestations, the 42-year-old Emanuel is an unlikely candidate for the seat. For one thing, he’s not from the district, at least not in the conventional sense. Most Chicago politicians push the notion that they’re neighborhood guys. They point to the parks where they played, the high schools they graduated from. But Emanuel isn’t a neighborhood guy. He didn’t grow up in Ravenswood, North Center, Albany Park, Portage Park, Dunning, Belmont Cragin, or any of the other communities that make up the Fifth District....

CROOKERS”Gypsy P””Burritos and Buenos (DJ Barletta VDJ Crack Refix)” It’s a blog sensation now (as well as an actual 12-inch on Warp), but the kwaito hit “Township Funk” came up via the ultimate un-Diggable source: cabdrivers in Pretoria. Kwaito is sometimes referred to as South African hip-hop, but that’s a rough translation at best—minimalist yet heavy, “Township Funk” has more in common with LFO’s sparse techno than anything on the B96 “Nine Most Wanted” countdown....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Billboard has revealed its year-end Hot 100 list, ranking the highest-performing singles of the year based on radio play, sales, and Internet streaming. Adding all those spins and sales up and placing them side by side produces some unexpected results. Some of the songs that seemed most inescapable this year—”Get Lucky,” “Royals,” “Locked Out of Heaven,” “I Knew You Were Trouble”—didn’t even crack the top ten....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The four-screen movie house at 6746 N. Sheridan formerly known as the Village North recently reopened in 2010 under new management and a new name. Despite receiving a substantial overhaul—which includes the introduction of a full bar to the concession stand—the New 400 feels very much like preserves the neighborhood vibe of the old Village North, making moviegoing feel like a natural part of urban social life....

Dog & Pony Theatre Company’s production of Noah Haidle’s disturbing dark comedy, about a four-year-old whose imaginary friends are as dysfunctional as the real folks around her, is performed on Grant Sabin’s gorgeous set, which successfully combines the protagonist’s fantasy and real lives. If only Krissy Vanderwarker’s passable to pretty good cast had been able to match Sabin’s vision and subtlety. Instead the ensemble delivers a bright, technically proficient, kind of empty-headed take on the play that doesn’t have nearly the comedic or dramatic power of Chemically Imbalanced Comedy’s grittier, more troubling version....

Alexi Front This glass of Voku Hila is at Local Option, not at Bottom Lounge. Who takes pictures of beer at a Kvelertak show? At last night’s Kvelertak concert, the bar at Bottom Lounge tapped two kegs from Local Option Bierwerker: a “steam beer” or dampfbier called Dampf Loc and a maibock called Voku Hila. This was no coincidence: Local Option promoted the Kvelertak show heavily. A few weeks ago Local Option brand manager Alexi Front got in touch with the band’s A&R rep at Roadrunner, his friend Dave Rath, so that the bar could put up gig posters around town (including several on its own walls) and give away tickets (including a few at an April 9 event featuring the only keg in existence of Ed Ploog’s It Burns When IPA from Against the Grain)....

For nearly two years now, Chicago art booster Paul Klein has been running a for-profit mini business school for artists. Klein Artist Works is a three-month webinar that meets weekly for lectures by guest experts, studio tours, and advice from Klein on how to maximize the potential and avoid the pitfalls of an art-world career. It has a broad reach, attracting students from places as distant as Norway and Hong Kong....

Cid’s Ma Mon Luk How likely is it that a Filipino family will invite you over for some of their traditional chow? No time soon, I’m guessing, so until then, Cid’s Ma Mon Luk is where to go for down-home cooking from the Philippines, set forth without ceremony (or much service—hey, this is mom’s kitchen, what do you expect?). Siopao is a rubbery meat-filled steamed bun, which I liked but that may be an acquired taste....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But snap–watching it was like instant 1997. I’d forgotten pretty much everything about the song and its video, probably because I’ve talked or even just thought about the “Benjamins” rock remix maybe three or four times total since it was in heavy rotation. For instance, I had completely forgotten that the Lox was on the song at all, and that Styles P wasn’t....

Ryan Sullivan invites me into the Fulton Market loft he shares with a couple roommates and an art studio and pours me a vodka tonic. Then he shows me where he recorded the first Golden Birthday album, Infinite Leagues. It’s not a studio but a table—a long work table that fills most of his cluttered, warrenlike living space. It’s strewn with keyboards dating from the Reagan years, effects units like an 80s Korg phaser and an entry-level Danelectro pedal, and, most significant, a Tascam eight-track cassette recorder....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 24 update: The CIP device, which can bring the United States to its knees in short order if it falls into the wrong hands, has fallen into the wrong hands, those of Colonel Dubaku, cohort of General Juma, the butcher of Sangala. Unless the CIP device is recovered and Juma overthrown, hundreds of thousands of innocent Americans and Africans will die....

Please note that this event has been postponed due to the threat of severe weather. New performance dates given below Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Think of it as Cirque du Soleil Goes to Sea. Or Venetian Night Meets Salvador Dali. Or just plain Very Similar to Certain Cool Things Redmoon Theater’s Done From Time to Time. Like, for instance, Redmoon’s 2004 performance in Ping Tom Memorial Park, with its river-borne lantern procession, this spectacle—to be staged on Lake Michigan by France’s Ilotopie—combines fire, water, strange conveyances, and eccentric characters....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ttowa is hardly the only Korean restaurant around town that exhibits a high degree of specialization, and these dumplings, or mandu, can be highly specific themselves–a few of them differ only in preparation, whether steamed, panfried, or deep-fried. My favorites here are the simple steamed mandu that come with a delicate wrapper so translucent you can see the filling inside....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If the low attendance at last night’s screening was any indication, André Téchiné’s Unforgivable won’t be playing in town for much longer. I recommend seeing it at the Music Box while you still can; the movie, like everything by Téchiné, benefits from a theatrical setting. In the work of this major French filmmaker, characters lead such complex lives that no frame seems capable of holding them (which a big screen only confirms)....

Arnold Schwarzenegger and Johnny Knoxville: a couple of jackasses? Making his Hollywood debut, South Korean director Kim Jee-woon (I Saw the Devil, The Good, the Bad, the Weird) has good fun with such American iconography as the Arizona desert, oversize guns, and Arnold Schwarzenegger; but the film still feels like a South Korean action comedy in its funky compositions and fluid camerawork, which privilege spatial coherence over moment-to-moment sensation. The story suggests a Looney Tunes reworking of Howard Hawks’s Rio Bravo, with Schwarzenegger playing a small-town sheriff forced to stop a violent drug cartel on its way to the Mexican border....

The Bad Apple Craig Fass and Mandy Franklin (Menagerie, Cooper’s) opened their beer and burger bar the Bad Apple a scant half block south of the venerable Jury’s, and while that institution attracts a decidedly different crowd, its burger is formidable and has been justly recognized as such for years. Now, with the Bad Apple shipping in a custom-ground beef mix from New York wholesale butcher Pat La Frieda, it’s difficult not to imagine a gauntlet has been thrown down between the generations gathering on each side of Lincoln Avenue....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Brian De Palma’s Passion came to town last Saturday for a surprise weeklong run at the Music Box Theatre, and continues through the weekend as a midnight show. I caught up with the film the other night with an audience of 15 or 20 (the Music Box’s main auditorium hadn’t felt so cavernous since that midnight screening of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls a few months back), and I was surprised not to have seen more people in the room....

When Green Mill owner Dave Jemilo bought a second Hammond B-3 last year, he must have had nights like this in mind: the city’s two leading jazz-organ men going head-to-head, pedals to the metal. Dueling organs come up a lot less often than almost any other instrumental matchup, since a single B-3 (with its multiple keyboards and timbres) can mimic half an orchestra. But Dan Trudell and Chris Foreman make fine sparring partners....

The New Electric Ballroom A Red Orchid Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The New Electric Ballroom had its world premiere in 2004, when Walsh was likely working on The Walworth Farce, and the two plays echo each other. The Farce concerns an Irishman who came to London years ago, when his two sons were tots. His idea then was to work in construction, earn good money, and bring it back home to Mum and the Motherland....

Like many east-coast businesses laid low by Hurricane Sandy, archival garage-rock label Norton Records (“Where the Loud Sound Abounds”) has found recovery to be slow going. Most of Norton’s inventory and much of the personal collections of founders Miriam Linna and Billy Miller were lost to flooding at their Brooklyn warehouse. A few benefit shows have been held around New York, but Norton could still use help. The folks from local fanzine Roctober are doing their part—on Fri 6/7 they host a “HurROCKane Relief” revue in the Volcano Room at Bottom Lounge with raffles, “surprises,” and live sets from outsider R&B auteur T....