Bin Laden Blowin’ Up myspace.com/binladenblowinup Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bin Laden Blowin’ Up had been lurking on the city’s spoken-word and underground-rap scenes for a couple years when they threw themselves a coming-out party in the form of the killer single “Chi Don’t Dance,” a juke-hop tribute to the city’s indigenous dance styles that became a staple of Chicago DJ sets in 2009....

Sepia 123 N. Jefferson 312-441-1920 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Andrew Zimmerman at Sepia does a knockout octopus confit, served with salty-sweet black-olive honey, pleasantly acidic preserved lemon, and perky mint salsa verde over a bed of fried chickpeas dusted with smoked paprika. The Mediterranean octopuses he favors (“Asian varieties are too small,” he says) spend some time in a marinade of aromatics, including cumin, coriander, fennel seed, crushed red chili, and garlic....

The box containing Oak Park-based comics auteur Chris Ware‘s Building Stories (Pantheon) is so gorgeous that you may be tempted to leave it in the shrink-wrap to preserve its pristine collectability. But don’t deny yourself the visual and literary pleasures contained within. Billed as a graphic novel, Building Stories consists of 14 separate items (15 if you count the 16-1/2″ by 11-3/4″ by 2″ box, and I would), mainly telling the stories of the inhabitants of a Chicago apartment building, in particular that of a lonely young woman....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » O farther sail! Both Tsai Ming-liang‘s I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone and Emanuele Crialese‘s Golden Door, two recent films dealing with the immigrant/guest worker experience, end in flourishes of hydration, with overhead shots that obliterate perspective and set the characters randomly adrift–in a water-filled Piranesi-like grotto in the first, a sea of Grade A homogenized in the second....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Have you ever tried to make kimchi? It’s a laborious process. You never just make one jar of it. You buy a whole box of cabbage, you need to shred a root vegetable – ( I forget the English equivalent for it), and prepare the red pepper paste, among other steps. My mother has made kimchi many times this past year – she was on a kimchi-making kick, and boy, was she exhausted afterwards....

Noah Haidle’s 2004 dark comedy concerns a precocious preschooler, Lucy, whose divorced mother neglects her, whose babysitter ignores her, and whose father is nowhere to be seen. So Lucy invents an imaginary friend, Mr. Marmalade. Problem is, he’s an overworked cocaine addict, emotionally distant and prone to unpredictable rages. Alternating scenes of daily life with Lucy’s increasingly dark fantasies–at one point she pretends to marry Mr. Marmalade, with dire results–Haidle creates a world both sad and funny....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If you’ve had enough bullshit summer blockbusters, make a beeline to River East 21, Landmark’s Century Centre, or Century 12/CineArts 6 this weekend and check out Kathryn Bigelow’s blistering war movie The Hurt Locker, easily one of the year’s best. Movies about the Iraq war are about as popular as swine flu, so as the radio guys always say at previews, “Go see it on opening weekend so we can keep it in the theaters....

Juan Zaragoza was just a toddler in 1969, when he left La Barca, Jalisco. But he never forgot the midafternoon cries of the cleaver-wielding birrieros, who carried big wooden boxes of steamed and roasted goat meat on their heads through the streets of the small Mexican city. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Like barbecueing in the U.S., the process of making birria varies and attracts fierce partisans, and these variations have found their way to Chicago, where birrieros hail from La Barca and other cities such as Ocotlan and Arandas....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » President: Barack Obama. Going out on a wing with this one. First Congressional District: Bobby Rush. Maybe next time opponent William “Dock” Walls should go for water rec. Third Congressional District: Daniel Lipinski. My daddy really is bigger than your daddy. State senate’s Fifth District: Rickey Hendon. Too many “white” candidates split the vote. State senate Seventh District: Heather Steans....

Like a lot of artists in Chicago, Free Street Theater artistic director Ron Bieganski has some experience teaching in the Chicago Public Schools. What he’s seen there over the years convinced him that he’d like something different for his own son, Marcel. This year, when Marcel turned five and kindergarten was looming, Bieganski began thinking seriously about creating a public school alternative. Free Street trains teenagers in experimental writing and theater, so it wasn’t a huge leap for him to imagine that if he pulled together a group of like-minded parents and a minimum of ten students, they could start their own art-centered, creativity-nourishing microschool....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Roger Ebert’s bankruptcy-induced memory (or so it seems) of life at the Sun-Times when he was young and it was healthy stopped me in my tracks. I read it, and then I immediately set my college roommate (who happened to be visiting) down at the computer screen and told him to read it. Ebert had done a much better job of making a life spent in the Chicago newspaper world sound marvelous than I could hope to....

For all their various tastes, serious record geeks fall into one of two categories. Some like to sit, dragonlike, on their stashes, and if they encounter anyone with enough record-collecting chops to know how rare and precious their treasures are, they’ll rub that in his face. Others are evangelizers—dudes who’ll burn you a CD-R of anything in their collection, no matter how valuable it is, if they think you’ll dig it....

Citizens of an Oregon coastal town where meth labs have replaced paper mills are divided by accusations of child abuse. But the truth–and an opportune wildfire–sets them free. Avoiding the show-off symbolism of slicker scripts, Alice Austen’s down-home drama is about real people who’ve reached dead ends: a confused charismatic preacher, a pot-growing “horticulturalist” who turns to orchids for redemption, an eco-terrorist intent on preserving the water by destroying farms. Nothing happens here because the audience wants it–there’s no wish fulfillment....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If you watched all the videos included in my recent B Side story on bopping—the playful, infectious, and increasingly popular dance movement heating up on the west side—you’ll notice a few faces that pop up in more than one. There’s Lil Kemo, aka Travon Biggs, the self-proclaimed “Bop King of Chicago” and the breakout star in the dance movement; there’s Dlow, aka Daryon Simmons, Biggs’s frequent dance collaborator and a bop star in his own right; and there’s Breezy Montana, aka 24-year-old Travaris Brown, who’s one of a small group of rappers providing a soundtrack for bopping....

F ew are allowed to pass through the gates to the citadel of power. But you, aspiring freelancer, may step into this gleaming realm with today’s deal: the opportunity to attend the prestigious Groupon Academy and compete for a staff writing position paying at least $33,000 a year. The cost to you? Merely the possibility that if you don’t get the job we could keep you from working anywhere else....

WHEN Tue 2/6, 6-8 PM Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When months passed without a response, Detzner assumed they weren’t. So he was surprised when he spotted the New Yorker issue of May 10, 2004, at least six months after he’d made his query. The cover featured a large oil derrick in the foreground spouting blood–just like the one he’d painted–with four smaller derricks behind it....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A super long time ago, when I was living in Kalamazoo, Michigan, a kid from the local punk scene put out a compilation CD that featured mostly shitty midwestern punk but through some weird turn of events also included this incredible hard-rock song called “Chainsawar” from a German band named Carnage. It was a really melodic Motorhead ripoff, with lyrics that were ESL enough to be awkward but understandable enough to make it clear that the song was about a biker gang engaged in chainsaw-based warfare in some kind of postapocalyptic wasteland....

Many more after the jump: Mike Sula Pink oyster mushrooms, the Plant Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » (23) breakfast spaghetti and clams, (24) nachos, (25) kimchi and bacon and eggs and pancakes, (26) fork pork chop, (27) smoked pork and toffee crunch milk shake, the Little Goat(28) pickle plate, Division Street Russian Baths(29) tofu, (30) jidori karaage, (31) yakitori don, (32) chicken tail, (33) shrimp, (34) king crab, Sumi Robata Bar(35) duck tom yam with cracklings(36) caldillo de carne seca, La Placita de Durango(37) Scotch Malt Whisky Society collection, Drumbar(38) kuchela(39) braised short ribs, Milt’s Barbecue for the Perplexed...

The Book of Mormon Through 10/6: Tue-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 2 and 8 PM, Sun 2 and 7:30 PM, Bank of America Theatre, 312-902-1400, broadwayinchicago.org, $65-$125. I may have missed The Motherfucker With the Hat, but I was the lucky motherfucker who got an opening-night ticket to The Book of Mormon. It was a star-studded affair: creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone (South Park, Team America: World Police) were there, and so were Rahm Emanuel and his son, sitting just a few seats down from me....

Once upon a time, many years ago, 33rd Ward alderman Richard Mell liked me. So imagine my surprise when out of the blue one of Mell’s legislative aides called to invite me to speak at the April meeting of the 33rd Ward zoning advisory committee. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Anyway, my meeting with the Mell gang took place in the basement of the Horner Park field house, at California and Montrose....