Superior Donuts Steppenwolf Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Good advice: don’t worry about writing another masterpiece, just write something. And it looks like Letts took it. Coming down off the exertion of creating a three-hour, O’Neillian knock-down-drag-out like August: Osage County—knowing he’d added a major piece of work to his credits, even if the Pulitzer committee hadn’t yet found out at that point—he just started writing something....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Let’s check in on our new corporate patrons, Sun-Times Media, and the Sun-Times‘s new weekday feature, the Daily Splash. The Splash, which debuted yesterday, features a rotating cast of 30 celebrities weighing in on the day’s issues—the celebs average out to about, say, B+ list, but OK, there’s also Rahm Emanuel. (I see your Emanuel and offer you Jenny McCarthy, who believes that childhood vaccinations cause autism, and Pete Wentz, who is Pete Wentz....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Stackenäs joins Jernberg as a member of the New Songs, a daring quartet that also features French pianist Eve Risser and Norwegian guitarist Kim Myhr. The group’s fantastic debut album, A Nest at the Junction of Paths (Umlaut), showcases many of the things that make Jernberg so unique. If Seval is a pop band of improvisers, New Songs is an art song project of improvisers; Jernberg and Risser wrote all of the music....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Nooooo…. I just don’t understand the wisdom of giving important space to columnist headshots, especially some of the most important real estate in the paper–basically, where the F1 would normally go. And those are some big-ass pictures. Plus the black shirts make them look like waitstaff at a nice restaurant. That’s a brave use of fonts. Also, confusing....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Millions of pounds of Asian carp are already shipped off from Illinois to Europe and Asia every year, and the beasts are fairly popular at ethnic markets around town. But Galvan wondered what would happen if some of his high profile clients got their hands on them and worked their mojo. Could they make this an appetizing fish to a larger market of eaters, and thus put a dent in its numbers?...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » DIY spaces in Chicago are frequently done in by their own success. As they put on bigger and better shows and attract more attention, they inevitably draw they eye of city authorities and police, who have little sympathy for the people who run these spaces (generally as labors of love); one person’s priceless contribution to Chicago’s cultural vitality is another’s fly-by-night firetrap....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For me, the 50th-anniversary reunion show at Second City on Saturday was epitomized by a single sketch—an oldie but goodie called Phono Pal, from the Old Town comedy theater’s fifth revue. Created in 1961 by Paul Sand and Eugene Troobnick, it depicts a shy loner (Sand) playing a record by a motivational speaker (Troobnick, from offstage). As he listens to the voice on the scratchy LP, the loner starts to converse and bond with it....

It’s not hard to imagine why the Chicago soul outfit the Final Solution would have jumped at an offer to record the soundtrack for the blaxploitation film Brotherman in 1975. They’d worked the Chicago club circuit for years as a vocal group called the Kaldirons, recording a lone 45 but never attracting much attention outside the area, then relaunched shortly before the Brotherman project with a new, unfortunate name (apparently oblivious to its genocidal connotations)....

The number—and size—of farmers’ markets for city dwellers continues to increase, and more and more feature prepared-food vendors. Many are run by the city of Chicago; those without Web sites listed can be found at chicagofarmersmarkets.us. Senior coupons are available through the state’s Department of Human Services, dhs.state.il.us/page.aspx?item=30521. —Vera Videnovich Hull-House Farmers’ Market12:30-5:30 PM, 6/29-10/26, UIC parking lot, Halsted and Polk between Polk and Taylor. Andersonville Farmers’ Market Now in its second year, this community-friendly market has added eight new vendors to its roster and will feature kids’ programming and live music....

WALL-E This weekend, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, as part of their ongoing “CSO at the Movies” series, performed the scores from select Pixar movies. Films made by the venerable animation studio have a distinct musical style, making them ideal fodder for “CSO at the Movies”—previous installments featured music from the likes of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Metropolis. Despite a recent run of awful films, Pixar still holds tremendous currency with moviegoers, no doubt fueled by the studio’s string of megahits in the mid-2000s....

thursday11 Thursday11 BrenmarClinic, Fresh & Onlys Friday12 Aloe BlaccDelicate SteveGeorge Lewis, Alexander Von Schlippenbach Saturday13 Luisa MaitaA Midsummer Night’s DreamSlink Moss & the Flying AcesSoviettes Sunday14 Dimmu BorgirKatinka Kleijn Tuesday16 Bosco Delrey Wednesday17 A Midsummer Night’s DreamTunng CLINIC, FRESH & ONLYS On their 2000 debut, Internal Wrangler, Clinic seemed to emerge from out of nowhere with a formula that didn’t need any tinkering: garage rock splashed with dubby melodica and played with the dispassion of the most robotic Krautrockers....

Plenty of Chicagoans contest their parking tickets by mailing a letter of protest to the Department of Revenue. Others go so far as to demand a hearing before a city administrative law officer. In rarer instances people take the fight all the way to court. If he loses, well, so it goes. “I’m fighting the only way I know how,” Weinberg says, “which is to sue the fuckers.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

When the U.S. Olympic Committee announced last Saturday that Chicago would be the country’s candidate to host the Olympics in 2016, Gerald Turner, the city’s top high school hurdler, didn’t join in the cheering. So until the weather warms up, most public school track teams hit the hallways. True, in the old days many great city runners–like Olympic champion Ralph Metcalfe–trained this way. But that was when no schools had indoor facilities....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Is that what I thought then? Not that I would change a word of it, but it’s very different from what I had to say 14 years later, when again I addressed the subject of children and risk. Obviously the men who died with Jessica made very stupid decisions. But someone has to grow up to be a test pilot....

Hip-Hop: For Chance the Rapper’s fans, the flashbacks come before Acid drops On Fri 11/23 local MC Chancelor Bennett—better known as Chance the Rapper—will headline Metro with a show called “Acid Rap Live,” after the title of his next mixtape. He plans to perform Acid Rap songs, but the collection won’t actually be released Friday. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The 19-year-old has checked off a lot of boxes since releasing his #10Day mixtape this spring: he packed streetwear store Jugrnaut for a #10Day listening party in April, sold out Lincoln Hall in June, and toured with popular MC Childish Gambino for part of the summer....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Not only has Daft Punk’s popular revival sparked a renewed interest in robot funk, but it seems that a lot of musicians saw the giant LCD-encrusted pyramid they were taking around festivals last year and said, “Me want.” Of course one of those musicians is mega-Daft Punk fan and guy who can’t stop himself from trying to top everyone else, Kanye West....

There’s a chilling moment in Chanoch Ze’evi’s documentary Hitler’s Children (2011) when Bettina Goering—whose great-uncle Hermann Goering commandedfounded the Gestapo under Adolf Hitler—reveals that she and her brother have had themselves sterilized, so as not to carry out the family line. Such is the burden felt by some people whose ancestors administered the Final Solution, five of whom speak out in this engrossing video. In addition to Goering there are Rainer Hoess (grandson of Rudolf Hoess, the first commandant of Auschwitz), Katrin Himmler (granddaughter of Heinrich Himmler, an architect of the Holocaust), Monika Goeth (daughter of Amon Goeth, who commanded the Plaszow concentration camp in occupied Poland), and Niklas Frank (son of Hans Frank, Hitler’s governor-general of Poland)....

The Hecks’ upcoming single In the Reader‘s 2012 Best of Chicago issue, I named the Hecks as this town’s best new rock duo. Since I first saw them in late 2011, I’ve been waiting patiently for a proper release from the two-piece, and finally, on Tue 2/26, we’ll have their debut 45, out on local label Moniker Records. The record’s A side, “Trust & Order,” which is available for listening on Moniker’s SoundCloud, is today’s 12 O’Clock Track, and makes me really excited to hear the other half of the seven-inch....

There’s a bamboo fish trap hanging from the ceiling above the register at Andy’s Thai Kitchen. It is cylindrical, about the length and diameter of a human arm, with its opening aimed toward the door to entice potential customers as if they’re hapless fish. But if you take this good luck charm for its full figurative purpose and imagine yourself a fish in chef-owner Andy Aroonrasameruang’s trap, it means you won’t be able to turn and swim away before he excises your air bladder, chops it into pieces, and deep-fries them so they puff like Cheetos....

The cloverleaf design Bertrand Goldberg used for Prentice Women’s Hospital was groundbreaking back in 1975, when the distinctive concrete structure went up on Northwestern University’s Streeterville campus. Supports for its four cylindrical towers were confined to the building’s core, allowing for open floor plans, with patient rooms fanning out conveniently from centralized nursing stations. This year, Rush University Hospital opened a new medical center at Ashland and Harrison. Designed by Ralph Johnson of Perkins & Will, it’s been drawing acclaim for its striking butterfly design featuring a curvaceous four-lobed tower, open floor plans, and patient rooms fanning out from centralized nursing stations....