Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Four years ago we looked to the incoming Chicago City Council with great hope and expectation—at long last, there would be a vigilant watchdog to guard us against the most egregious excesses of an all-powerful mayor. Silly us. Let’s just say things didn’t turn out as we’d hoped: aside from some modest, occasional steps forward, we witnessed four more years of aldermen rubber-stamping mayoral initiatives—think of the parking meter lease deal, millions of dollars’ worth of barely monitored corporate subsidies, raids of the rainy-day piggy bank, and head-scratching appointments of yes-men, hacks, and misfits to head city agencies....

Courtesy of Chicago Film Archives Image from Jesse McLean’s “Love and Care of Animals” In early June Chicago Film Archives hosted its second annual Media Mixer event at the Hideout, a fund-raising event for the organization where filmmakers are invited to create new work from its ever-growing archives. CFA then pairs up the filmmakers with local musicians to create original soundtracks. This year Alexander Stewart worked with Sam Prekop (the Sea and Cake and an accomplished photographer and painter himself), Jesse McLean was paired with footwork duo Sich Mang, and Cauleen Smith collaborated with Damon Locks and Wayne Montana of the Eternals....

Any day you’re asked a good question is a pretty good day. The other day I was asked two. I’d already quoted these quotes in something I’d posted online. Now I reviewed them. Kass was asking for a Little Golden Books version of democracy. Hinz wanted a Chicago where democracy works. Pretty to wish for, thought Byrne, but he seriously doubted Chicago could function as a democracy and the real question, he concluded, was whether Chicago could continue to be functional at all....

Stiles Anderson and Glen Schwartz faced one major hurdle when they decided to start their own denim company: neither of them knew anything about making jeans. “Looking back, people must have thought I was an idiot,” Anderson says. “But sometimes being an idiot is a good thing. You don’t have to admit that you’re stupid–you just have to keep asking questions.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Schwartz and Anderson, neighbors in a Lincoln Park apartment building, met in the fall of 2004....

Ayako Kato decided to stop dancing at the age of 19, after 15 years of ballet training in her native Japan. “I wanted to be prima ballerina,” she says. “But you must win in competitions or that pathway is shut.” She thought, “If I cannot be useful as dancer, I should quit.” So she got a degree in international studies, married, and moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where her husband studied economics at the University of Michigan....

The city’s most progressive showcase for jazz and improvised music dropped down from five days to four in 2009. But it’s back at full strength this time around, thanks to increased participation from European consulates and embassies. Ten countries are involved in the European Jazz Meets Chicago minifest that opens Umbrella, four more than in any previous edition, making it necessary to stretch that segment out across two consecutive nights at the Chicago Cultural Center....

A Complete Introduction to Disco: 1970-1980 Various artists (Universal) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the nightclubs that played host to underground DJ culture, though, attitudes evolved very differently. For one thing, dance fans have long understood that disco didn’t “die” per se, and in their eyes it never needed to be revived or rehabilitated. There was no rupture in its history, no period of dormance....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Pvt. McCormick, in comments: “as of this moment, 24 hours after Whet’s original post, ChuffPo remains atop the Reader in a Google search for ‘Bon Iver Vic.’” This is actually a pretty profound point in re SEO dark arts. San Francisco: they are coming for your content, too. Ironically, their SF-specific VC sugar daddy justified the investment by saying: “The Huffington Post benefits from… an approach to content that leverages other news and blogger feeds in a manner traditional media players have not....

In the summer of 2007 Dave Mata spotted a crate of records outside a warehouse in Wicker Park. Mata, a musician and soul DJ, asked the workers inside if he could buy the vinyl, and also asked about work. He wound up with three crates of records and a job helping to clear out the packed space. “Then it all got too weird,” Mata says. “I realized this was all probably part of a collection....

The Chef: Toni Roberts (Roof, State and Lake)The Challenger: Amanda Rockman (Balena, the Bristol)The Ingredient: Sheep’s milk Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The milk is rich and creamy, with about twice the fat and protein of cow’s milk; it’s also higher in calcium and rich in vitamins and minerals. It’s not widely consumed, though, accounting for just 1.3 percent of the world’s milk production (cow’s milk makes up 84....

Alison Green This is what Robert Smith of the Cure looks like now. Attending Lollapalooza requires some planning; with an estimated 100,000 attendees descending upon Grant Park each day, merely maneuvering through the masses with friends presents a challenge. Some folks carried markers to help friends locate them from a distance—a flag from, say, Ireland or Brazil would pop up in the middle of the crowd, as did the blown-up cut-out face of Honey Boo Boo or Nicolas Cage (circa Vampire’s Kiss)....

Kate Schmidt Every day is Dia de los Tamales Last Thursday and Friday were so cold I sympathize with Cesar Ruelase, the local who, disgusted with Tom Skilling’s penchant for predicting weather less foul than the reality, has launched a campaign to demote him from meteorologist to “weather guesser.” Things brightened when I hit the new Pilsen storefront Dia de los Tamales, now going on its third week. Here are tamales about as far from the wares of the Tamale Guy as you can imagine: for example, there’s an Italian beef tamale, a cheeseburger tamale, and a chocolate-peanut butter tamale....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Grant Orchard and Sue Goffe’s wacky A Morning Stroll, produced by the British outfit Studio AKA, runs only seven minutes, but it’s so neatly conceptualized that it feels like a longer film. The source material is “The Chicken,” a short story by one Casper G. Clausen that appeared in the New York Literary Review in 1986 and, I’m guessing, inspired the movie’s tripartite structure....

Questions we’ve heard over and over in the last year9/29/72 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » How can we afford to give the paper away for free? This question is best answered with another one, “how can we afford not to?” There are (for purposes of this argument, at least) three ways to begin a periodical. 1) You can start big, charging for the paper, and plan to invest a fortune in promotional activities....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The suggestion that Williams’s “troubled life” might have consigned him to hell led some readers to wonder whether Kelly was referring to the playwright’s homosexuality. Kelley later sought to clarify that by “troubled life” she was referring to Williams’s dysfunctional family situation, the inspiration for The Glass Menagerie. But the questions kept coming in on both Steppenwolf’s blog and the Reader‘s....

From the dubious exercise of outing gay conservatives (Outrage), veteran muckraker Kirby Dick turns to a more worthy crusade: exposing the epidemic of rape in the U.S. military. Dick focuses on a handful of women who were sexually assaulted while on active duty, but they’re only the tip of the iceberg; according to the film, which draws all its statistics from government reports, more than 20 percent of female veterans have been assaulted....

Jun Takahashi has lived in Mount Prospect for a year now, but with his wife still back home in Tokyo, he’s often left to his own devices. He’s a 29-year-old business analyst for Mizkan Americas, a Japanese-owned corporation that makes vinegars, cooking wines, and other Asian sauces and condiments. About once a week he goes to a small izakaya a few minutes’ drive from his house. “For me it’s really comfortable to be there because of the master,” he says....

Let’s take a moment to doff our hats to the International Olympic Committee, which has accomplished what no one in Chicago—not the press, the City Council, other politicians, or the voters—ever has: it’s made Mayor Daley tell the truth about city finances. In retrospect, if Daley had been more honest up front, he might be better off today. Had he made the case to the public that spending two, three, maybe even five billion dollars on the Olympics would be a good investment, the public just might’ve bought in....

In 1937, László Moholy-Nagy arrived in Chicago to establish the New Bauhaus, an American version of the German art school dedicated to the principle of intelligent design. No, not that kind of intelligent design. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Over the next dozen years, the New Bauhaus would undergo seven moves and three name changes before getting absorbed into the IIT Institute of Design in 1949, a little more than two years after Moholy’s death....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One of my favorite things about teaching a film history class is discovering movies I’ve never seen while researching the ones on my course list. Case in point, preparing for my upcoming Facets course on James Whale (which you can sign up for here) has led me to the work of German director E.A. Dupont, whom Whale cited as an influence....