Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last night at the Vic I caught Let Freedom Hum: An Evening of Comedy Hosted by Martin Short, which was very funny indeed. The show was taped, too, and can be seen on TBS Friday 6/26, 10 PM. Rogers Park native and frequent Zanies performer John Roy opened with a solid set, riffing on the brutal Chicago weather (It’s hard to be an environmentalist, he said, in a place where “Mother Nature is trying to destroy you”) and being broke (“Let’s see what the Iron Chefs can do with two Kraft singles, a can of Bud Lite, and a pickle....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “American opulence and American success have combined to foster and encourage another legend of early origin, the legend of American innocence. According to this legend Americans achieved a sort of regeneration of sinful man by coming out of the wicked Old World and removing to an untarnished new one. By doing so they shook off the wretched evils of feudalism and broke free from tyranny, monarchism, aristocracy, and privilege–all those institutions which, in the hopeful philosophy of the Enlightenment, accounted for all, or nearly all, the evil in the world....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s not official yet but a particularly credible little bird told me that we can expect a visit some time in May from Slow Food founder Carlo Petrini, who’ll be touring in support of the U.S. publication of Slow Food Nation: A Blueprint for Changing the Way We Eat, due out in late April. It’s more than a simple book signing....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Chicago rapper Chief Keef is one of the biggest music stories of the year—both his sudden rocketing to fame and fortune based on a handful of YouTube clips and his callous response, just as his career seemed to be reaching critical mass, to the shooting death of a rival rapper that very likely had something to do with both artists’ gang connections....

Tobacco Road American Blues Theater Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » All the same, a lot of people chose to dismiss Mr. Caldwell’s grossness in that very way, including Chicago mayor Edward Kelly, who called Tobacco Road “a mass of outrageous obscenity” and banned it from being performed in the city. (Enterprising producers tried presenting it on a showboat—the Dixiana, based in Michigan City—but threw in the towel after the Dixiana sank, got rammed by an out-of-control naval reserve vessel, and then sank again for reasons unrelated to the ramming....

When an eco-friendly music festival serves all its beer and wine in 100 percent biodegradable corn-based cups, you know it means business. West Town’s second annual Green Music Fest, located on Chicago between Ashland and Noble, runs this Saturday and Sunday from noon-10 PM and features a main music stage (booked by House Call Entertainment, which also books Subterranean) and a DJ stage. Saturday’s lineup, headlined by reggae legends the Wailers, also includes the Aggrolites, Deal’s Gone Bad, Furious Frank, and T....

About a month ago I called on the citizens of Chicago to revolt against our screwed-up tax system by filing lawsuits—but I never dreamed it would happen this way. On August 20, in the midst of the fuss state senator James Meeks has raised about the spending gap in education funding, the Chicago Urban League filed suit against the state, seeking to overturn our system of financing public education. Represented by legal powerhouse Jenner & Block, the league has been egged on by none other than Mayor Daley—the irony of which I’ll get to in a bit....

Kevin Warwick Devoid of lumberjacks OK, the gimmick: Homeslice is a log-cabin-style pizza joint. What that means is there’s enough well-lacquered Douglas fir crammed into the Lincoln Park spot to warrant real concern over the displaced squirrel population that formerly roamed the trees’ branches. But before you roll your eyes because who the hell associates wearing turtlenecks and warming up next to a fire with huffing down slices, let me say that the decor at Homeslice is strangely charming and homey (albeit with a dash of clubby lighting), and the pizza is absolutely legit—which may or may not influence my take on the space, whatever....

Miles Raymer,Reader music writer, is obsessed with . . . Townes Van Zandt, Sunshine Boy: The Unheard Studio Sessions & Demos 1971-1972 For a bunch of demos and outtakes from aborted sessions, Sunshine Boy is surprisingly revelatory, as well as infinitely more listenable than such things usually are. A mix of “Pancho and Lefty” scrubs away the popular version’s unfortunate kitsch simply by muting its strings and mariachi horns, while the previously unreleased “Sunshine Boy” offers an alternate-universe vision of the Texas troubadour as a fuzzbox-addled psych rocker....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » With rumors flying hot and heavy, the Tribune posted a headline on its home page Tuesday night that said, “Former Sun-Times columnist Mariotti not joining Tribune.” The reason given by Mariotti in the single-sourced story was that for legal reasons he and the Tribune “both decided that we can’t do what we wanted to do.” His contract with the Sun-Times, the paper that let him quit last month, contained a noncompete clause, and “the Sun-Times’ lawyer threatened me with a lawsuit in 64-point type” if he crossed the street....

—As told to Aimee Levitt Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “After slavery, there was a whole displaced group of people who weren’t used to having to make their own way. It was a completely different life. They had food supplied and housing, but they were slaves and worked like animals. Then they had freedom and had to fend for themselves. And there weren’t any jobs....

Fifteen years ago, Tim Lefens accepted an invitation to make a guest artist appearance at the Matheny School, a New Jersey residential facility for kids with disabilities. Lefens, a painter, wasn’t prepared for what he found there. The kids, mostly quadriplegic and unable to speak, faced extreme physical challenges. Here’s his description of the first of three students who showed up for his lecture, from Flying Colors, his 2002 book about the experience:...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » People obsessed with novelty are usually the ones who complain when a music writer revisits a particular subject. For a while in the 90s, certain readers (and even some of my editors) seemed convinced that I wrote about saxophonist Ken Vandermark every week—and though it’s true his name came up often because he played so regularly and in so many different contexts, needless to say I did no such thing....

I first studied when I was about eight or nine [in Madrid]. I didn’t care so much for dance, actually. I was too young to appreciate it. It was after the first three years that I started to get passionate about it. Alejandro Cerrudo, 32, performs with Hubbard Street Dance Chicago and became its first resident choreographer in 2009. His most recent work was One Thousand Pieces, an evening-length dance—HSDC’s first—as mystical as its source: Chagall’s America Windows at the Art Institute of Chicago....

Lots of electronic groups incorporate elaborate visuals into their live shows, but the UK duo of Andy Turner and Ed Handley, aka Plaid, took things one step further with their most recent release, last year’s CD-DVD set Greedy Baby (Warp)–their video designer and director, Bob Jaroc, gets equal billing on the cover. (He’s also coming along on this tour.) The discs allow folks who’ve missed Plaid live to enjoy at least a portion of the meticulously engineered synesthesia their expansive post-techno creates with Jaroc’s freaky, wondrous films and animations....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When Canadian journalists asked a few weeks ago what Chicagoans thought about Black’s federal corruption trial, I had to tell them most Chicagoans weren’t thinking anything. I had a flash of deja vu Monday as another out-of-town reporter asked about the reaction of Chicago to the sale of the Tribune. I said that if she were asking about the sale of the Cubs then we might have something to talk about, but the proprietors of the Tribune haven’t made much of a dent on the public consciousness....

QI am a heterosexual male in my 20s, and I need some help putting a label on my kink/fetish. I usually don’t care much for labels in any aspect of life, but I’m hoping that knowing what to call this may help me find others who share the same interest: I love it when a woman watches me masturbate. She doesn’t have to touch me at all, take off her own clothes, or play with herself....

Q Where can a straight guy find a transsexual woman who isn’t a hooker and just wants to be friends with benefits? I know of one club where they hang, but they’re mostly hookers there. I’d like to go someplace where I could meet one and see if we hit it off and go from there. I know they’re out there, but I just can’t find them! Help a brother out!...

In Chicago, when the warm weather comes, seemingly every nook, niche, and neighborhood throws its own street fair. In the old days, you could expect cover bands and locals only playing to the fried-cheese crowd, but increasingly neighborhood fests are partnering with actual music biz types to draw top-notch bookings. Add to these the bigger spectacles of Blues Fest or Pitchfork and you could practically have the majority of your weekends planned through September....

“Opponents of the death penalty looking to exonerate wrongly accused prisoners say their efforts have been hobbled by the dwindling size of America’s newsrooms, and particularly the disappearance of investigative reporting at many regional papers. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Tribune is far from being the only publication to lay off copy editors and proofreaders, scaling back the quality-control process and paying a price....