Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Now Pro Publica’s up to a staff of 28 (two Pulitzer winners from the LA Times have just agreed to sign on), and on Monday, Edward Wasserman of the Miami Herald judged it on its first big story. He was properly enthusiastic — he called Pro Publica a “dazzling new investigative reporting outfit” that had just collaborated with 60 Minutes on a “scathing examination” of al-Hurra” — the badly managed and little-watched news network the Bush administration set up in Virginia at a cost of $100 million a year to broadcast in Arabic to the Middle East....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In a splendid coincidence, Vincente Minnelli’s Some Came Running and Johnnie To’s Life Without Principle are playing back-to-back at the Gene Siskel Film Center tonight (if you’re busy, they’re screening again, Running on Tuesday at 6 PM with Fred Camper providing an introduction, and Principle tomorrow at 3 PM). I’ve compared Minnelli and To before; and while they’re associated with different genres (Minnelli with musicals and melodramas, To with gangster movies and romantic comedies), their similarities are more instructive than their differences....

The Chef: Anna Shovers (the Publican)The Challenger:Dana Cree (Blackbird)The Ingredient: Chicory root Chicory root has a bitterness similar to coffee, Shovers said, but it’s more chocolatey and not as intense in flavor: “It’s a little more mellow, a little more earthy.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Shovers also sprinkled burnt cinnamon around the edge of the plate—she likes cinnamon in her coffee—and made a coffee-chicory granita “to bring in another ice factor, something that wasn’t as creamy....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Low Down Hoe Down, an all-day and all-night collision of punk rock, skateboarding, and organic farming, is happening this Sat 8/31 at Peasants’ Plot farm in Manteno, Illinois, and this year it’ll be celebrating its tenth anniversary. Hidden within the farm’s 20 acres is a barn that holds a gigantic skateboard ramp—Todd McDonald, who runs Peasants’ Plot with his wife, Julia, is a lifelong skateboarder....

As 2008 wound down, things were pretty quiet in the wacky world of Rogers Park politics—no major fights had broken out in, oh, several months. And then the Nation released a list of the year’s “most valuable progressives.” Picked as the most valuable local official in the country was none other than Rogers Park’s representative in the City Council, 49th Ward alderman Joe Moore. For his part, Moore says he was delighted to accept the award, “if only because I knew it infuriated the people who can’t stand me....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A combination antiwar statement and ghost tale, based on a Henry James story, the opera was commissioned for BBC TV, where it premiered in 1971; then it was pretty much forgotten. The setting is British and late Victorian, but the message–aggh–is as timely now as it was during the Vietnam war. The title character, convincingly played and sung by baritone Matthew Worth, is heir to a military tradition he detests; the war he has to fight is the battle for peace, waged entirely at home....

Pink Torpedo’s demo There are a lot of garage-rock bands in Chicago, so it’s easy to lose track of them. Over the past couple of years one of my favorites, Pink Torpedo, has kind of flown under the radar, which is too bad, because they’re a really great band. Pink Torpedo, like pretty much every other cool band in town, is made up of members from a bunch of other already cool bands (in this case, current and former members of Canadian Rifle, Catburglars, and Meat Wave)....

Space 2,000 square feet | Rent “less than $2,000” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Fortunately they had an agreeable landlord and no compunctions about getting their hands dirty. Carter knew her drywall from doing art installations, and as a teenager in Barrington Campbell had helped his father, a Scottish immigrant, build their family home. They added walls to one existing platform to create a semiprivate bedroom, cutting holes for an indoor window and a small opening for the cat, which likes to use the exposed pipes (thoughtfully planked with wood) as a catwalk....

QMy wife beat breast cancer five years ago. Went through chemo and radiation and ultimately radical surgery. Brave, lovely, and lucky woman she is. But after the procedures, she said she was proud of her post-op look and the zigzag scar across her chest. No new boobs for her. Moi? I don’t like going to bed with Peter Pan. We talked about this and she wants to stay scarred and boobless....

QI’m going to Barack Obama’s inauguration in Washington, D.C., on January 20. I’ve spent eight years, one month, one week, and one day waiting for this. (But who’s counting?) However, I am looking for suggestions for a respectful way to protest the participation of Rick Warren. As a lifelong Episcopalian, I really don’t want to engage in an antireligious protest. (FWIW: I was annoyed with some of the antireligious people at the anti-8 rallies....

KASAI ALLSTARSIn the 7th Moon, the Chief Turned Into a Swimming Fish and Ate the Head of His Enemy by Magic(Crammed Discs) The Kasai Allstars don’t go for the in-the-red amplification Konono No. 1 favors for its likembes, but the instruments nevertheless form the music’s core, their luminously resonant crosscutting pulses buoying all the other action. The percussion complement is more varied than Konono’s, including wooden xylophones that split the difference between marimba and balafon; a massive wooden trapezoidal drum called a lokombe, which resembles a miniature, out-of-proportion parlor door, like something from Alice in Wonderland; and a kind of hand drum, or tam-tam, that can create a rubbery, metallic twang, a bit like a supercharged jaw harp, via an additional vibrating membrane—another source of the rattling buzz the Congolese dig so much....

“Full disclosure!” snorted my daughter Laura when I told her what I was working on. “Nobody discloses everything. Nobody told me when I gave money to John Edwards that some of it would be used as hush money.” Which is something to keep in mind as this column shifts from the latest Washington sex scandal to its actual subject—full disclosure as Chicago Public Radio didn’t practice it during its June pledge drive....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Since Yelp did not yet exist, and since I spoke only enough French to assure French people that I was a harmless and well-meaning, though linguistically stupid, American (not the kind that walks into a store and bellows “ANYBODY HERE SPEAK ENGLISH?”, please no; it was a glorious day when I was mistaken for a Canadian), I was largely dependent on my friend Angela, who was letting me crash in her apartment....

Richard Gibbons is a Chicago architect and figurative painter obsessed with the sculptural form of the human body. Most of his work has been cool, nearly abstract, and devoid of narrative except for what the viewer might supply. But his current show, “Confession,” at Roy Boyd Gallery is a departure—a group of contemporary religious paintings, including three large triptychs, that give voice to a long-simmering struggle with the Roman Catholicism in which he was raised....

We’ve all seen this movie before: a hard-nosed cop bends the law to keep bad guys off the street, blasting the cowardly suits in the department who privilege political correctness over public safety. When he walks into an interrogation room, everyone finds somewhere else to be; when he comes back out, the brutalized suspect has given up the information they need. A Vietnam veteran with 24 years on the force, Officer Dave Brown (Woody Harrelson) lives for the Los Angeles Police Department, its valor and esprit de corps....

A guy dancing in a jungle. The other day I was walking around listening to the new Future & Freeband Gang mixtape* and thinking about how artists these days (especially in hip-hop and dance music) are pretty much expected to collaborate with other musicians—and how cool that phenomenon is. On one hand it’s produced a lot of good music, either by uncovering synergy between the artists or by introducing an element of head-to-head competition....

In Restvale Cemetery in the southwest suburban village of Alsip, a tree with two gnarled trunks juts from the ground in a stark Y. In its shadow, in two unmarked graves about 20 yards apart, lie blues musicians Joe and Charlie McCoy, brothers who died in Chicago 60 years ago. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Musician and self-employed Web developer Arlo Leach, who moved from Chicago to Portland, Oregon, last year, became enamored of the McCoys while teaching a class on jug bands at the Old Town School in the early 2000s....

Julia Naglestad Hedvig Mollestad Trio A couple of years I was taken by the debut album by Norway’s Hedvig Mollestad Trio, who purvey a loud, hard-hitting instrumental jazz-rock fusion as lean as it is fierce. The group recently released its superb and satisfying second album All of Them Witches (Rune Grammofon), and while it strains credibility to really call it jazz, there’s no missing that the group comes out of that tradition....

Ida Lupino directed and starred in The Bigamist Tomorrow night at the Portage Theater Northwest Chicago Film Society will screen The Bigamist (1953), the last film Ida Lupino directed for the independent production company she cofounded in the late 1940s. For this reason alone, The Bigamist holds a significant place in American movie history: when it was made Lupino was literally the only female writer-director-actress in Hollywood. Film scholar Wheeler Winston Dixon has noted (in an informative essay he wrote for Senses of Cinema in 2009) that before Lupino first took directorial credit on a film—the 1949 noir Never Fear—it had been six years since any woman in Hollywood had done so....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Not that there’s any shortage of temporary fixes—aka structuralist nirvanas: “like watching paint peel,” the cynics usually scoff (but not me! not me!)—and the middle of April brought in two: Benning’s own One Way Boogie Woogie/27 Years Later at UC Doc, a “remake” cum update of his ’77 classic that our critic in chief described as “poignant and fascinating” (which I’ll have to take his word for since I couldn’t squeeze it in), and Sharon Lockhart‘s catatonic/contemplative Pine Flat, a Benning-like “documentary” comprising 12 long takes (actually 14 counting spliced-in intermission and credits roll) of ten minutes each, which played for a single night at the Film Center....