Artists of Eastbank Holiday Art Sale Original works by nine artists, priced under $200. Sun 12/6, noon-5 PM, 1200 W. 35th, 4th floor, artistsoftheeastbank.com, free parking at Racine and 34th Place. Cornelia Arts Building Holiday Show and Sale This juried event features work by more than 40 artists. Opening reception Fri 12/4, 6-9 PM. Sat-Sun 12/5-12/6, 11 AM-5 PM, Cornelia Arts Building, 1800 W. Cornelia, 773-935-8094, corneliaarts.com. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

I gotta give a shout-out to Ron Huberman for a masterful performance at his June 28 press conference. But as I reported in April, hundreds of central office salaries, including Huberman’s own, have been hiked in the last year. And he’s continuing to hire new employees for the central office—he recently posted three positions in the office of Academic Enhancement, each of which pays up to $136,000 a year. And the Board of Education hiked its own allowance to cover travel, seminars, subscriptions, and other expenses....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What’s a “classic” Chicago restaurant? Totally subjective, but Penny Pollack makes a good argument in the introduction to Chicago’s Classic Restaurants: Past, Present and Future. The Chicago mag food editor’s plaint is that the ever changing menus and “educational” focus of today’s restaurants come at expense of kitchen consistency and the diner’s ability to let her hair down and order a reliable chicken Vesuvio....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The brilliant German pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach opens his new album Schlippenbach Plays Monk (Intakt) with a glassy, introspective free improvisation called “Reverence.” Schlippenbach enhances the selection of Thelonious Monk compositions with a series of brief improvised interludes and an epilogue that tie together or link his interpretations (if not let us hear his musical thinking between interpretations), while “Reverence” seems to set the tone from the outset....

From Melika Bass’s Waking Things Tomorrow nightTonight Doc Films continues its local-filmmakers series with two works made in 2011 by Melika Bass, Waking Things and Shoals. Both films appear to take place in the past, yet it’s hard to say exactly when, or if, they take place in the past at all. Bass raises the possibility in each that her characters live in the present but in isolation from modern life....

This weekend, check out what former Chicagoan Eduardo Vilaro has been doing—choreographically speaking—since 2009, when the award-winning Cuban-born artist left the troupe he founded here, Luna Negra Dance Theater, to direct New York’s venerable Ballet Hispanico. Vilaro’s company choreographic debut, Asuka (2011), is one of four Chicago premieres being staged here, at a venue more intimate than usual for BH. A love letter to Cuban women, Asuka is set to music by Afro-Cuban singer Celia Cruz, whose trademark cries of “Azucar!...

The End of Music Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Why worry about the big bad corporations and their cashing in on artistry (never mind all of the corporations building the equipment that many of these so called outsiders need and use)? It will only allow the next wave of outsiders to gain footing—intentionally or not. You can’t possibly believe that in the history of pop music this establishment hasn’t been a perfect setup for someone else to come along and supposedly shake up the establishment?...

Alison Green The Postal Serivce headlined Lollapalooza on Saturday. The biggest story of Lollapalooza’s second day involved a band that didn’t even show up—Death Grips. I wasn’t terribly surprised given the noise-rap group’s reputation; they are, after all, the same guys who had an extremely public falling out last fall with their old label, Epic, after they leaked their second album, No Love Deep Web (which is perhaps better known as “that album with the erect dick on the cover”)....

Emery Moorehead: “He was shaped like a lifeguard, but the lines have blurred. If he walks into the next world like this, they’ll never recognize him.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Cohen reaches back to the origins of pro football as a brutal sport played by brutal laborers in mill towns. “Football is an angry game, played with punishing violence,” he writes. “People get destroyed on the field, lives end....

Muntu welcomes a guest choreographer for its 35th-anniversary gala performance: Brazilian native Rosangela Silvestre. Artistic director Amaniyea Payne, who’s known Silvestre for ten years, calls her work “pensive” and says her technique is “demanding of self–you need to be focused, centered, to know yourself.” According to Payne, Silvestre’s world premiere for Muntu, Guide, interweaves “breathing, form,” and “how energy is directed” with “traditional spiritual movements of the orishas,” deities associated with the natural world....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If you tuned in to this summer’s Republican National Convention in Tampa or any number of the GOP’s stump speeches in the last few months, you may have been surprised at how eager Republicans are to bring up our fair city. Not to heap praise upon us, sadly (although vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan was a big fan of Mayor Emanuel’s stand against the Chicago Teachers Union), but to tell the American electorate that President Barack Obama, who soared into office on the wings of a compelling, high-minded appeal for hope and change, is a slimy, old-school machine pol—”nothing more than a Chicago ward politician,” in the words of New Jersey governor Chris Christie....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Not being an active party in the creation/extinction of anything recognizably humanoid, I can more or less indulge this visceral discomfort on an immediate, pragmatic level without being held seriously accountable. Judd Apatow‘s slacker romantic comedy Knocked Up would like to get away with that too—aaiiieee, the A word, let’s not talk about it, OK?—but the behavioral understanding that underlies the film, about what people of a certain age/class/education/earning capacity do when confronted with purportedly “real-life” choices (though in fact they’re all stereotypes—which actually reduces the amount of wiggle room available), doesn’t make that option feasible....

Sun-dried dog poop in the parkway? Disgusting. Desiccated cow poop flung across a field in Wisconsin? Get in the car! It doesn’t take much to make a road trip appealing in the summer, but if you need an excuse, take your pick. —Sam Worley June Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » American Players Theatre This year’s season at the theater in the woods includes performances of Shakespeare’s As You Like It and All’s Well That Ends Well, George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara, and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot....

When Greg Cahill formed the Special Consensus in 1975, he was 28 and had already been playing banjo for more than ten years—though for the first few he unwittingly wore his thumb pick backward. When he decided to give it a go as a professional bluegrass musician, he says, it was “to get it out of my system and to learn how to play right.” He committed to a year....

Thursday10 BombamanRachid TahaWrack Friday11 Chico TrujilloDenny Zeitlin Trio Saturday12 FleshtonesSo Percussion with MatmosThird Eye BlindDenny Zeitlin Trio Sunday13 Ingrid FliterStarringWrack Monday14 Tony AllenStarring Tuesday15 Man Forever Wednesday16 Indian JewelryThe Thing with Joe McPhee RACHID TAHA On his latest album, Bonjour (Knitting Factory), husky-voiced French-Algerian singer Rachid Taha downplays his roots in Algerian rai and chaabi in order to adopt an amalgam of international pop flavors. Having parted ways with longtime producer Steve Hillage, he’s working with up-and-coming French pop auteur Gaetan Roussel, who gives this slightly stylistically erratic collection a much slicker, more dance-oriented sound....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Why wasn’t a single reference to George W. Bush made by anyone–including Ellen DeGeneres in her gently laid-back stand-up routines? Probably for the same reason that I rarely heard Bush mentioned by anyone in conversations when I was recently in Rotterdam, Toulouse, and Paris. Why beat a dead horse?, the deceased in this case being the fate of the world, or perhaps innocent civilians in Iran, not a spry but clueless leader....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A friend pointed out to me today that the concept behind the Secret Radio Be-In (“a creative free-for-all with no stuffy time slots,” says Chicago Public Radio’s Daniel Ash. “Some of the most brilliant scenes have been when there’s no programming and people are just there, coming together. . . . Take that vision and imagine a virtual space or a radio spectrum that brings that visual but the people are connecting”) has been tried before by CBS affiliate KYOU in San Francisco....

No one minds a leader dialed in to the future so long as that person also shares a wavelength with the here and now. At Chicago Public Radio there are staffers who feel they speak on one frequency and president Torey Malatia responds on another. Having observed that the word journalism appears nowhere in the strategic plan, the staff immediately insisted on its primacy. What they called the “near-collapse of traditional media outlets in Chicago” gave WBEZ a “unique opportunity,” they argued: “to be the source for credible, innovative journalism in our region—one that reflects diversity of opinion and thought and provides depth and context, allowing and empowering our users to respond and act....

Don’t let the title mislead you. Porn has nothing to do with industrial sex fantasies. András Visky named his play after the alias jokingly conferred on his main character by the Securitate, communist Romania’s secret police, who listen in even—perhaps especially—while she makes love. In fact, the woman they call Porn is a theater artist, considered worthy of surveillance because she’s got the nerve to put on street performances of plays like The Bald Soprano, by Romanian expatriate Eugene Ionesco, and to distribute food and clothes to the audience of kids she calls her “little dirty ones....

Filibustering is no longer difficult—a senator needn’t even speak. Talk is cheap, but not talking is even cheaper. And yet senators are able to block bills with a filibuster that doesn’t require them to speak, or even be present. Gone are the days of an exhausted Senator Smith valiantly holding down the senate floor. To filibuster today, a senator can literally phone it in. This makes filibustering too easy, which in turn has paralyzed the senate....