Green Green (Lion Productions) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I won’t pretend to know what Prozac had to do with anything in ’86, and it was never exactly dangerous to play pop in Chicago, but Green was in fact a breath of fresh air: at the time the city’s underground rock scene was pretty underwhelming, with the notable exceptions of the Big Black/Naked Raygun noisy postpunk axis, the art-damaged post-Bauhaus sounds nurtured by the Wax Trax store, and stray prodigies like Eleventh Dream Day....

Venerable reunited Chicago pre-emo band Smoking Popes announced a new album and tour over the weekend via Twitter. This Is Only a Test, the band’s second full-length of new material since their 2005 reunion, is due March 15 via Asian Man. Staying true to emo form, it’s a concept album written from the perspective of a high-school senior. Eli Caterer tells Gossip Wolf that it was recorded a few songs at a time over 14 months with Matt Allison at Atlas Studios....

“Awesome” was the word that came to mind when I received a mass e-mail from Ed Marszewski last week announcing that donations for the sixth annual Version festival would be–brace yourself–tax deductible! Marszewski, grand master of the antiestablishment art underground, is going institutional: his Public Media Institute, which produces both the Version fest in the spring (this year it’s from April 19 to May 6) and the Select Media festival in the fall, became a state-sanctioned nonprofit in December....

Four and a half years after Chicago sold control of the city streets to a consortium of investors, Mayor Rahm Emanuel and the City Council are taking steps that would make sure the city is stuck with the deal for the next seven decades. There’s only one problem with these assertions—they’re not true. In 2009 attorney Clint Krislov filed a suit on behalf of the IVI-IPO, a public-interest group, challenging the constitutionality of the deal....

Jason McLeod, the (now former) executive chef at Ria and Balsan, challenged Chris Pandel, chef at the Bristol, to come up with a recipe using jujubes for this installment of our weekly feature. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » He would have liked to try working with the fresh fruit, but it’s hard to come by in February, so dried jujubes it was. “It’s essentially a date,” Pandel said....

books Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In high school in San Francisco’s south suburbs, “where all I had were comic book spinner racks and UHF TV to keep me company,” Calhoun grew fascinated with the story of the original Count Dante—a south-side Chicago Irish boy named John Keehan who taught and promoted martial arts here in the 1960s and early ’70s. (You can read my 2006 Reader feature about him and Floyd Webb, the local filmmaker who’s working on a documentary about him, on the paper’s Web site....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “No animals were harmed in the making of this picture.” You can’t say that about the picture the Tribune ran June 24 to accompany a story about the love Russian men have for the blood of maral deer, in their eyes the tonic for every ill that aging throws at them. It’s a photo (not available online) of a wide-eyed deer with a bloody stump on its head, an antler having just been sawed away....

When I heard that Mayor Emanuel intends to spend $55 million of your property tax dollars to build a hotel and basketball arena on the near-south side, I thought it must be a cruel joke he’s playing on the people of Chicago. As I write, protesters have taken to the streets in the hopes that angry demonstrations will accomplish what crying, begging, pleading, and reasonable argument haven’t: convince the mayor to change his mind....

Comfort in a Pot If Arun Sampanthavivat’s posh restaurant doesn’t fit your budget, try this serene Thai eatery owned by chef Rangsan Sutcharit, a nine-year veteran of Arun’s. The room is simple, but the menu, elegant plating, and painstakingly artistic garnishes are hard to beat at these prices—there’s hardly a dish over $10. Fluffy chive dumplings are light as a cloud and served with a black soy dipping sauce redolent of molasses....

Mike Sula Grilled cheese at Sauce and Bread Kitchen When I last checked in with Mike Bancroft, he was pushing a line of three excellent hot sauces in order to fund Co-op Image, the youth arts-education center he founded on the west side. Since then the sauce business has been very good to him—and to the arts center. Today Co-op Sauce is an independent business, with a full line of ten sauces (plus short-run seasonal and collaborative ones), as well as vinegars, salsa, barbecue sauces, and pickles, all produced with a bounty of locally grown produce....

“At a young age, in my teens, I had to decide whether I wanted to buy albums or T-shirts,” Justin Anderson says. “I guess the narcissist in me wanted to wear the bands I listened to rather than have a record collection. I opted for the shirts and have been collecting for about 12 years.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Anderson’s collection now runs approximately 225 shirts deep—90 percent of them black—and includes genres of music you expect to traffic in grim colors and outrageous designs of gloom: heavy metal, doom, psych, grindcore, thrashcore, and a slew of other “cores....

QI am a 23-year-old straight male. My ex-girlfriend and I started dating in high school, when we were both 17, and continued dating until I broke up with her the summer after our freshman year in college because things felt too serious. We continued to have sex, but I blocked out all my feelings for her, while she was open about still wanting to be with me. She started dating someone else sophomore year....

Taste of Chicago hits Grant Park this week, and as usual it’s got more to offer than massive amounts of food and drink and an equally massive number of festivalgoers—namely a diverse roster of live music. The Bud Light Stage, at the south end of the grounds, hosts themed lineups of mostly local acts from noon till 8 PM Wed 7/10 through Sun 7/14, while the big names every evening at the Petrillo Music Shell lean toward mainstream rock and pop....

This 1975 African-American version of The Wizard of Oz is in some ways more dated than the 1939 MGM musical: Charlie Smalls’s disco score was the last note in goofy funk. But its relentless self-affirmation (“Believe in Yourself”) anticipates today’s glut of power ballads. Bethany Thomas’s wicked witch is nothing but good news, and Craig Joseph’s sassy staging for the White Horse Theatre Company detonates the dancing. This production also registers the unevenness of William F....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “In the course of all the reading I did for my book of the pre-Iraq War ‘debates’ this country had both on television and in print, what is most striking in retrospect is the casual and breezy tone which America collectively now discusses and thinks about war as a foreign policy option, standing inconspicuously next to all of the other options....

AFRICA: 50 YEARS OF MUSIC VARIOUS ARTISTS (Discograph) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In compiling 50 Years, Ibrahima Sylla—don of the venerable Syllart Records—was assisted by Pierre-Olivier Toublanc, Arnaud Bassery, and Pierre René-Worms. They’ve divided the box into six mini sets by region: east, west, north, central, south, and Lusophone. (The north African portion was handled by Bouziane Daoudi and Bruno Barré.) Each region gets three CDs to strut its stuff, and each trilogy is arranged chronologically to one degree or another....

“You’re a strange kid,” says the old lady to the drug dealer in “Janet Tell,” one of ten stories comprising Hot Pink (McSweeney’s Rectangulars). “You’re clever.” Yes, and so is Hot Pink‘s author, Adam Levin. In fact, Chicago-based Levin (who curated the Reader‘s 2010 fiction issue) is responsible for one of the strangest, cleverest novels of recent years, The Instructions—a tale of middle-school messianism that runs to 1,030 pages in hardcover....

Afro Zep myspace.com/afrozep Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Led Zeppelin 2 seem like the obvious choice here—they put on a spectacular, spot-on show, they sell out halls as big the House of Blues, they’ve got what might be the best possible name for a Led Zep tribute act, and the guy flashing torso as Robert Plant is Bruce Lamont of Yakuza. But I gotta give it up for Afro Zep....

communityglueworkshop.wordpress.com “Everyone has a broken lamp. Everyone in the world,” says Carla Bruni. It’s by far the most common item brought in for repair at the “Fix-Ups” that Bruni organizes with her friend Ally Brisbin, owner of Kitchen Sink Cafe (where most of the events take place). A historic preservationist, Bruni read an article about the “repair cafes” taking place in Amsterdam, and decided it was something Chicago needed; last summer, she and Brisbin launched the monthly event, where anyone who’s got something that needs fixing can bring it in for attention....

Pinning down an appropriate roller derby alter ego—one that embodies the sport’s rough-and-tumble spirit—can be a challenge. Whether it’s a homophone (Dawn Ting), a play on a band (AliSin Chains), or an invented weapon (Rusty Razorskates), the nickname should strike fear into an opposing line of blockers as you scrum for position to let your jammer through—and it should look cool on a trading card, too. When in doubt, you can also butcher a celebrity’s name or mutate a TV or movie character into a disfigured slayer of the track....