I’m no numbers guy, and I’m oh so very far away from being a money guy, too. But as explained by British playwright Lucy Prebble in her 2009 dark comedy Enron, the financial maneuvers that led to the biggest bankruptcy in American history aren’t all that hard to understand. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What’s a little harder to understand is why the Enron brain trust didn’t see what they were letting themselves—and loads of innocent victims—in for when they first decided to finesse the difference between real and conceptual money....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Obama’s already resigned from Trinity United Church of Christ to get out from under his associations with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright and Father Michael Pfleger — which didn’t help at all with such hostiles as the National Review. Tony Rezko made national news as an Obama associate when he was convicted Wednesday, and the GOP jumped in immediately with this video....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The centennial of John Cage (his actual birthday falls on September 5) has generated an unprecedented wealth of international concerts and recordings of the composer’s music in 2012, and this Thursday through Saturday Northwestern University is adding to the slush pile with the John Cage Festival, a two-day symposium and handful of concerts, including the So Percussion performance on Saturday that I wrote about in this week’s Reader....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For instance, Rex Murphy observing (subscription required) in the Globe and Mail that a new Canadian federal budget had been eclipsed by “The Great Chicago Litigation of Lord Black of Crossharbour,” the prime minister having failed to compete with “Lady Black’s stage-wise and shattering remarks through a closing elevator door about certain journalists as ‘sluts’ and ‘vermin.’” Murphy went on to insist that while “Lord Black is too frequently singled out for his polemical virtuosity, the sheer exuberance and gothic luxuriousness of his diatribes, Lady Black is no slouch either....

Doug Shorts has been trying to get his foot in the door of the music industry since the late 60s, when he was a student at Wells High School near Ashland and Augusta. But it wasn’t until about five years ago, when he working as a doorman on Lake Shore Drive, that he met the man who’d finally release some of his songs on a proper label. Shorts, 62, lives in Chatham, but he grew up on the near north side, where he started singing in soul bands at age 16....

First the good news: 16 aldermen voted against Mayor Daley’s proposal to stick the Chicago Children’s Museum in Grant Park. That’s 16 more than voted against his plan to put a CTA subway station in the bowels of Block 37, a $320 million white elephant that just may prove to be the single greatest waste of money this city has ever engineered—though the competition’s pretty fierce. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

In the early 90s, an unfamiliar breed of customer began filtering into the West Loop’s J.P. Graziano Grocery Company, asking for single boxes of pasta and quarter-pound slices of pecorino Romano. Jim Graziano says his father, James, and great-uncle Paul didn’t know what to make of them. “They’d look at them cross-eyed,” he says. “Like, ‘What are you talking about?’” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Though he’s only 29, Jim Graziano has worked in the store for 20 years....

Wild Chicago, which WTTW broadcast on Sunday nights from 1989 to 2003, always gave the Reader its stiffest competition in chronicling local lore, and the new DVD The Golden Age of Wild Chicago, which collects programs from the first two seasons, is a treasure trove of oddballs and oddities from the city and suburbs. Ben Hollis, the original host, and John Davies, who produced and directed, introduce this program of selections, which are funny, weird, and richly evocative of the city in the 80s....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That’s a dramatic promise, for two reasons. First of all, the ballpark’s owner, Sam Zell, is his boss. Zell likes to make his money hand over fist, and he thinks he can make a ton of it by selling naming rights. Morrissey’s not paddling his corporate oar when he swears never to use the new name regardless. Other columnists are shaking a fist at Zell....

Radio-online.com is reporting that Chicago’s 89.3 WKKC, the hip-hop and R & B station based out of Kennedy-King College, is completely removing songs with lyrics that are “violent, sexually explicit, derogatory toward women or racially offensive” from its playlist. As director of operations Marv Dyson describes it, “Being a radio station that is under the auspices of an institution of higher learning, 89.3 WKKC-FM will no longer bleep, delete or edit out the offensive language in the songs we play....

Women’s flesh—plentiful or scant, covered or bare, yielding or starkly resistant—is the bottom line in “Voices of Strength,” two programs of dance theater by women from Africa. Buzzwords about race and gender can’t convey the visceral jolt delivered by this mini festival of four works by five African women. Most of the participants have studied and performed in Europe; the piece closest to Western sensibilities is the often sardonic Correspondances, a duet by stick-thin Kettly Noel (born in Haiti, based in Mali) and Nelisiwe Xaba (South Africa)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Satelliti is officially my new favorite experimental-electro jazz-influenced noise band. On today’s 12 O’Clock Track, “Voltage,” the Italian duo of keyboard/synth master Marco Dalle Luche and drummer Andrea Polato seem to blend genres without ever thinking about it—the pace of the jam, much of it seemingly improvised, is fearlessly frenetic, with a stream-of-consciousness-type composition. Off their new full-length, Transister (Cuckundoo), the track begins with a rapid seething pulse as the drums both accent and piddle around....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But, in fact, the big-haired hostess, co-owner Loula Athans, died in 2011, and places like this have been quietly vanishing for a long time. As Eleven City Diner owner Brad Rubin noted to me of the genre, old coffee shops “used to be on every corner and they’re about gone. I think it’s a generational thing—the parents did it, maybe they owned the building, but they worked seven days a week, and the kids look at that and they don’t want to work that hard ....

The 19th annual Black Harvest Film Festival begins this weekend at the Gene Siskel Film Center and runs through the end of August. Committed to “celebrating the stories, images, and history of the black experience and the African diaspora,” the fest focuses on the work of independent filmmakers, many based in Chicago. The festival kicks off Friday evening with “A Black Harvest Feast,” a gala screening of four family-friendly shorts: Martine Jean’s The Silent Treatment, Steven Caple Jr....

The Blackhawks have a team of young offensive talents who play the game beautifully. I’ve often said nothing is uglier than October hockey—unless it’s November basketball—but the Hawks have been fluid from the start in rising to the top of the National Hockey League Central Division standings. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In one game against the Anaheim Ducks, the Hawks’ Patrick Kane—out to fulfill his own pledge to become one of the game’s elite players this season at the age of 23—pulled off a spin-o-rama assist sure to make his career highlight reel whenever he retires....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mullen resolved his dispute last November, and the agreement sealed his lips. “All I can tell you is it’s always about the money,” he says. The joint statements issued in both the Chicago and Akron cases pretty clearly favor the Broadway team. Both Mullen and Carousel wound up paying an extra fee, above and beyond the music-and-book-licensing tariff they’d already paid, “for their use of the material originating in the Broadway Production”—material that included the work of the director, choreographer, lighting director, set designer, and costume designer....

The Reader’s Guide to the 30th annual All the other action is in Grant Park as well, and as always the music is free. Afternoon sets are at the Jazz on Jackson stage (on Jackson near Lake Shore Drive) and the Jazz& Heritage Stage (south of Jackson near the Rose Garden), where the programming includes family-oriented shows and concert-demonstrations. Friday through Sunday the New Orleans All-Star Brass Band—a group assembled especially for the fest from members of several Crescent City outfits, including the Pin Stripe, Paulin Brothers, and New Birth brass bands—plays two sets on Jackson between Columbus and Lake Shore Drive, one at 11 AM and the other at 4 PM....

Local gossip columnist Jessica Hopper and her budding lawyer baby daddy Matt Clark welcomed a son on Tuesday, July 20, so Hopper has temporarily turned over her Gossip Wolf duties to staff writer Miles Raymer. Hopper was experiencing the pangs of false labor the prior Saturday afternoon at Pitchfork; numerous tipsters have told Gossip Wolf that the only people laboring harder with less to show for it at the fest were Panda Bear and Michael Showalter....

In this spoof set in 1969, director Sean Cusick and company send up campy sci-fi flicks, military propaganda reels, soft-core porn, and early cigarette commercials. The humor ranges from wordplay (check off becomes Chekhov) to innuendo/gross-out (“I’ll make sense–in your hair”) to the offbeat (“In my spare time I sit down”). The show features werewolves, hippies, genius doctors/inventors, and Nazis (including a queenish Hitler) as well as some surprising blocking and antitheatrical exits....

Lushly romantic and defiantly original, French-Canadian writer-director Xavier Dolan’s third feature film is about a man who loves a woman, then becomes one. French heartthrob Melvil Poupaud plays the title character, a heterosexual Montreal author and literature teacher who’s blissfully committed to film production manager Frederique, or Fred for short (Suzanne Clement). Turning 30, he reveals his desire for a sex change to her, and kicks off a rocky decade-long period of adjustment....