“Our alderman is the invisible man. Calls unanswered, things not getting done…. The job isn’t that difficult.” Robert Jones Good work, Fioretti. Take notes, Waguespack. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ann Coulter is HST’s literary heir?! I’ve read a lot of criticism on HST and never heard him compared to Coulter once. Thompson was a maverick whose politics could be best described as libertarian (aka: hard to pin down), and though they’re present in his writing, they’re not the focus....

Don’t Mince Words Mr. Cortez After reading thousands of words, I still have no idea “what’s wrong with Up in the Air.” You spent the first half of the column writing about every other 2000s movie. Then you give a smarmy and condescending plot synopsis. At no point in the article was there anything close to film criticism. So in 5000 words or less, please tell me what you didn’t like about the movie....

The Trib’s Secret Project The thing that this doesn’t let go of is the idea that we want a portmanteau publication with a little bit of everything in it. A Life magazine, a Sears catalog. But that’s not where the world has gone. Instead of Sears where you can go to one store to get everything, you have the mall where you can go to 100 stores to get everything. The real innovation will come when the newspaper realizes that it’s a content creation collective which can take many final forms....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Not that I hate Oscar so much, because actually I don’t—I simply don’t pay that much attention. And it’s not an attitudinal or put-on thing—at least not mainly—since not once in my life have I ever watched the whole damn telecast straight through. Besides which, we just gave away our minimally operable 30-year-old Motorola—sometimes the antenna worked, on some of the channels anyway—so it’s not even the NCAA Final Four for me this year....

Presented by Chicago Filmmakers, the 29th Reeling festival runs Thursday, November 4, through Saturday, November 13, at Chicago Filmmakers, Columbia College Film Row Cinema, Instituto Cervantes, Landmark’s Century Centre, and Showplace ICON. Unless otherwise noted, tickets for all screenings are $10, $8 for matinees (before 5 PM), and passes are available for $45 (five shows), $80 (ten shows), $125 (all shows, excepting special admissions), and $150 (all shows and events). Tickets can be purchased online at reelingfilmfestival....

Best of the Burbs Carlos and Debbie Nieto have operated this intimate French dining room in Highland Park since 1981. The atmosphere is regal, with handsome dark-wood trim, richly toned fabrics, and elegant porcelain dinnerware. Ramiro Velasquez runs the kitchen, dazzling patrons with the expertise he gained under such powerhouses as Jacky Pluton, Don Yamauchi, Eric Aubriot, and Alan Wolf. A la carte dishes include Hot and Cold Foie Gras—seared Hudson Valley foie gras with grenadine-infused caramelized onions and chilled La Belle Farms foie gras on banana bread with vanilla syrup—and herb-crusted rack of lamb....

DEATH Initially the Hackneys, who were African-American, played soul and R&B, but a live show by the Stooges turned their heads around. The youngest of the brothers, guitarist David, pushed the group in a hard-rock direction that presaged punk, and while this certainly didn’t help them find a following in the mid-70s, today it makes them look like visionaries. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The 1976 single, “Politicians in My Eyes” b/w “Keep on Knocking,” came out on a small regional label....

In February we lost a great musician and a great band at once: after drummer Charles Gocher died of cancer at 54, his coconspirators of 25 years, the Bishop brothers, laid the Sun City Girls name to rest. Guitarist Sir Richard Bishop has been growing his own garden for a long time, though; not unlike the band’s stuff, his solo work is part punk aesthetic, part world-music exploration, and part occultish avant-gardism and assumes a Hindu pantheon’s worth of forms....

The fluster of T-Money’s truck engine turning and turning but never catching, stalled out in a church parking lot in the middle of the day, was an inauspicious start to his minor role in what the Justice Department considers the most significant drug trafficking investigation in Chicago history. The last thing T-Money needed was to disappoint the Twin. His car trouble had come at a delicate time. T-Money was behind on payments....

As I have said previously I do not want to be involved in this affair. That is why I asked for the reassurance that these letters would be kept private. I do not wish to be shunned like Officer Laverty has been….Almost all of the detectives and police officers involved know the Wilson’s did the murders but they do not approve of the beatings and torture….I advise you to immediately interview a Melvin Jones who is in the Cook County Jail on a murder charge…....

Young Jazz Lions Stage Jazz on Jackson Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 2:20 PM James Falzone’s Klang: The Goodman Project Clarinetist James Falzone, leader of Klang, clearly has a thing for the trio music of Jimmy Giuffre—a gorgeous, austere, and distinctive variety of chamber jazz that’s focused on the ensemble rather than the soloist. That’s not to say the group’s excellent studio debut, the recent Tea Music (Allos Documents), has a lick of slavishness about it, just that you can tell what their likely jumping-off point was: Falzone, bassist Jason Roebke, drummer Tim Daisy, and vibist Jason Adasiewicz, all of whom contribute tunes, function as a unit, forming an array of gripping unison patterns and abstract contrapuntal lines....

The Printers Row Lit Fest is from 10 AM to 10 PM on Saturday, June 8, and from 10 AM to 6 PM on Sunday, June 9, in the Printers Row district—Dearborn between Congress and Polk—and a couple off-site spots, like the library. We’ve pulled a few favorites from the more than 200 author readings, discussions, and sundry other events; everything’s free, though some talks require advance reservations. And of course there’s the fair—what organizers bill as the largest outdoor two-day book fair in the midwest....

Tim Dog Back in February rap geeks around the world mourned the passing of Tim Dog, a Bronx-based MC who caused a stir back in 1991 when he released “Fuck Compton,” an inflammatory single that helped set off the East Coast/West Coast feud that would eventually result in Biggie and Tupac’s murders. It was also hard as hell, which is one of the reasons why it’s managed to stay in the hearts of rap fans who found the beef to be otherwise tragic and meaningless....

Grand Teton National Park Photo Galleries Mountains (not the band) It’s damn cold outside, the kind of Chicago freeze that makes you feel like you’re walking through a meat locker. When the weather gets this frosty, and especially during the daytime, I tend to default to ambient music, which somehow straddles the line between the bracing blood rush of unearthly wind and the calm that emerges from being in those kinds of temperatures for an extended period of time....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the 70s Batiste worked with Julian “Cannonball” Adderley, but for most of his career he stuck close to home, leading his own ensembles. Perhaps his greatest fame came as a member of the Clarinet Summit, a licorice-stick quartet with John Carter, David Murray, and Jimmy Hamilton. “Mr. Bat,” as he was affectionately known in New Orleans, stubbornly found a way to use his instrument in bebop, a music of such rhythmic ferocity that the clarinet usually has trouble keeping up....

One day late last summer, Tom Courtney came up with the preposterous notion of running for alderman of the 27th Ward. He wasn’t the only 27th Ward candidate playing the election-law game. Alderman Walter Burnett Jr.—the four-term incumbent —was also at it. Then Courtney knocked Rowans off the ballot for owing $60 on a parking ticket. And since Nally—I mean, Courtney—couldn’t prove otherwise, Kasper—I mean Burnett—won that round. To which, Burnett counters, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha....

Musically gifted as he is, sometimes I wish Andrew Bird would just take it down a notch. He has a tendency to revel in his own cleverness–take “Scythian Empires,” a tune from the brand-new Armchair Apocrypha (Fat Possum). “Their Halliburton attache cases are useless,” he sings, “while Scotchgard Macintoshes shall be carbonized.” Give me a break. Fortunately, his phrasing complements the other musical gears whirring behind his richly detailed tunes, so you can focus on the sound of his words rather than the meaning....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Some musicals are more than just musicals. They inspire a response well beyond appreciation or delight. People get fervent about them. Steven Sater and Duncan Sheik’s Spring Awakening is a perfect example. Based on the scandalous 1906 masterpiece by German playwright Frank Wedekind, it puts a rock beat to the spectacle—the tragedy—of kids trying to negotiate adolescence in an atmosphere of intense sexual repression....

From Robinson’s These Hammers Don’t Hurt Us (2010) Tomorrow at 6 PM the Museum of Contemporary Photography will host a program called “Video Playlist: Short Circuit Sparks,” a collection of short films and videos curated by video artist Michael Robinson. The 31-year-old artist, whose work is currently on display at the Carrie Secrist Gallery, describes the program as an examination of “connections between television and self-understanding, specifically through physical, spatial and psychic interactions with TV monitors themselves....

“The Prairies and Plains,” Walt Whitman wrote, “while less stunning at first sight, last longer, fill the esthetic sense fuller, precede all the rest.” David Foster Wallace loved the way that, along midwestern highways, “the corn starts just past the breakdown lanes and goes right to the sky’s hem.” Even Barack Obama has praised “the flat, checkerboard fields of western Illinois.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Plowden grew up in New York City, but found it noisy and crowded: “You couldn’t see the sky....