Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » While his Senate pick was making his way to Washington—only to turn around and make his way back to a place he was actually wanted—Governor Rod Blagojevich set the dates for a pair of elections to determine who will fill the Fifth Congressional District seat recently vacated by Rahm Emanuel. So far 11 candidates have filed paperwork with federal election officials announcing their intention to run (though one of them, Blago sister-in-law Deb Mell, subsequently announced she’ll settle for her new seat in the state House instead)....

Deepa Mehta’s film of Midnight’s Children The movie version of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, which opens Friday at the Gene Siskel Film Center, suffers from an inferiority complex that’s common to film adaptations of highly regarded novels. The movie feels overstuffed with incident, as though the filmmakers (including director Deepa Mehta and Rushdie himself, who’s credited with the screenplay) were trying to include as many details from the book as they could....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A full-page ad for the section that ran in Tuesday’s WSJ showed a picture of a baseball ripped open at the seams, conjuring the baseball phrase “tearing the cover off the ball.” The image also resonated with the ad’s headline, “Go deep,” and suggests the paper is interested in digging into core issues, something it doesn’t particularly argue in the rest of the ad:...

How did this come about?Several years ago I remember watching TV, and it was either PBS or one of the public access channels, and it was a tribute to a local business doing well. And I thought, Wow, this is great—for once we’re getting news about someone in the manufacturing business doing well! Unbelievably, a month or so later, I got a call from the owners of the company. It was for a meeting....

The last four pages of the menu at Joey’s Brickhouse, a Lakeview restaurant known for its kitschy decor and all-you-can-drink Tuesday-night pizza special, have nothing to do with food. They’re a series of angry e-mails between a woman from Deerfield named Diane and the restaurant’s owners, brothers Greg and Joey Morelli. The restaurant’s tagline (“We’re Italian Jews. Which means besides bickering, we’re into food”) notwithstanding, Greg Morelli says, “This has been a nightmare on our heads since the day we opened....

Speaking of Michael Ruhlman, I just found out he’ll hit Chicago on Sunday, March 4, to interview Grant Achatz live on the Steppenwolf stage. !!! Despite having some issues with his most recent book, The Reach of a Chef, I still count him as one of my favorite food writers–elegant and passionate but with the research chops and bulldoggish tenacity required of the best narrative journalists. His previous book, The Soul of a Chef, is the book that got me hooked on food writing in the first place, serving as the philosophical anchor of a piece I wrote about Charlie Trotter’s in 2001....

See our reviews and live coverage of the bands playing on: Friday · Sunday · Afterparties Pitchfork main » In 2012 Winnipeg trio KEN Mode won the Juno Award for Metal/Hard Music Album of the Year for their fourth record, Venerable, which goes to show that the Junos have a much better handle on heavy music than the Grammys ever have or will (come to think of it, the Pitchfork festival hasn’t done such a great job either)....

Q About a month ago, I got drunk and slept with my friend’s girlfriend. (He’s not my best friend, more of a second-tier friend.) We both swore never to tell anyone and left it at that. Only problem is, we’ve been hanging out a lot lately and sending private messages to each other multiple times a day, but nothing physical. It’s progressed to the point that our mutual friends are starting to notice that there’s something going on between the lady and me....

Stewart Brand is famous among people of a certain age and disposition for the Whole Earth Catalog, the oversize compendium first published in 1968 that’s been described as a forerunner of the Web browser. He ought to be famous for his idiosyncratic and astonishing 1987 book, How Buildings Learn. But these days he’d like to be famous for getting environmentalists to loosen up and embrace genetic engineering. He sees a world of green potential in it: “Grow commercial wood directly–so straight-grained and close-grained and beautiful and inexpensive that cutting a wild tree for lumber would seem ludicrous,” he urges in a 2006 interview with Conservation magazine, going on to cite thinkers like physicist Freeman Dyson, who once envisioned a plant whose trunk could be tapped for refined gasoline, and Craig Venter, founder of the Institute for Genomic Research, who’s proposed developing an organism that massively sequesters carbon and another that generates hydrogen....

By Driving home from Skinner Park in the West Loop early last June, Greg Cumber heard a sound that made him abruptly pull over. “It was the sound of an animal getting hit by a car, or like a child’s shriek,” he says. Looking around, he located the source of the cry–a small Newfoundland dog being led around the park by a tall African-American woman with a large remote control in one hand....

Illinois is neither blue nor red. Scott Lee Cohen just made everyone a libertarian. One hard look at the permanent record of the Democratic Party’s new nominee for lieutenant governor—a look that might have been more profitably taken a week before the primary rather than the day after it—and all voices rose as one. Why do we even have this useless office? We need to get rid of it! When the Democrats nominated Lyndon LaRouche acolyte Mark Fairchild for the post in 1986, it wasn’t because the LaRouchies were masters of deceit....

There was a time in living memory when winter holiday entertainment came in two semiofficial flavors: A Christmas Carol and The Nutcracker. Well, ha! That’s over. You can still get your dose of tradition at, say, Goodman Theatre and the Joffrey; other possibilities, meanwhile, have not only multiplied but atomized. If your inclinations run that way, you can now have your Dickens done in Klingon, silent-movie style, or with a craft-beer theme....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Late 90s Champaign-Urbana emo trio American Football has been a major source of inspiration for the countless new underground bands currently reviving the style’s second wave, and lately American Football’s influence is beginning to seep into other genres. Just yesterday Saint Pepsi—a producer who came up in the vaporwave scene as the sound’s originators began distancing themselves from the tag—premiered “Unhappy” on the Fader, and the tune is an upbeat reworking of American Football’s “The Summer Ends....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Katie Aselton and Ross Partridge in “Feed the Fish” After 20 years in Hollywood, including as assistant editor of Fight Club and editor of his uncle Tony Shalhoub‘s Monk, Michael Matzdorff returned to his family’s Door County farm last year to direct his first feature, the comedy Feed the Fish. Ross Partridge stars as a burned out children’s book writer who heads into the north country, seeking inspiration in the polar bear plunge, as well as in a lady hockey player (Katie Aselton), a rural wise-man (Barry Corbin), and a relentless sheriff (Shalhoub)....

So here’s Conrad Black, the former Canadian and present British lord, in the dock in Chicago facing fraud and racketeering charges that arise from business deals and noncompete payments negotiated almost entirely with Canadians over Canadian media properties. The cover of the special Conrad Black edition of Maclean’s, their national newsweekly, puts it bluntly: “The United States vs. Conrad Black.” “He’s wacky but he’s ours,” Canadians are inclined to think, “and we’re grown-up enough to try him ourselves if we think he deserves to be tried....

The Reader’s Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » MnM Treasures, a local husband-and-wife team known simply as Michele & Mike, make Jada belt buckles with resin, papier-mache, glass, and wood. Leather belts, in black or brown, are $10. a$10-$18, mnmtreasures.etsy.com. Our new president-elect has made it chic to be from Chicago. You can broadcast your pride with this Chicago’s Finest messenger bag emblazoned with the city’s flag....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If anyone wonders why terms like “jazz” and “improvised music” don’t cut it, look no further than two musicians performing in town this weekend: Boston saxophonist David Gross and Denver trumpeter Ron Miles. Gross, who plays Sunday at Enemy, reduces free improvisation to its most elemental qualities. Although he has a jazz background, over the years he’s eliminated all traces of jazz harmony, melody, and rhythm from his playing....

Miles Raymer, Reader staff writer Friendzone, DX James Laurence and Dylan Reznick, aka Friendzone, aren’t the first guys to make a lateral jump from the noise-punk scene to making rap beats, but they’re way more successful at it than most. The chill-as-fuck “Fashion Killa” from A$AP Rocky’s Long.Live.A$AP is their doing, and they produced the entirety of 808s & Dark Grapes III, the latest from Oakland duo Main Attrakionz. They like airy synth pads, lots of reverb, and post-trap beats, which makes their instrumental stuff sound kind of like the rap equivalent of new age music....

Wrapports LLC, the parent company of the Sun-Times and the Pioneer Press suburban weeklies (and the Reader), is surely proud of Aggrego, the hyperlocal-news-gathering operation that is “building the future of community media” by tapping into a huge market: 18,000 communities that represent 13,000 local media outlets and $135 billion local ad dollars. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But the guild is not persuaded....

The Chef: Giuseppe Tentori (Boka, GT Fish & Oyster)The Challenger: Charles Joly (the Drawing Room)The Ingredient: pollen Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Giuseppe Tentori used to take bee pollen in smoothies, so he was already somewhat familiar with it. “I think it’s used more for medicinal qualities than flavor,” he said. “I really like the flavor, but it’s not for everybody.” The gnocchi were a traditional potato variety, consisting of roasted potatoes passed through a food mill and mixed with egg yolk and a bit of flour; the one difference was the bee pollen paste Tentori made by heating the granules with a little water....