I wasn’t going to write about the New Yorker‘s March 8 profile of Mayor Daley. As a general rule, I don’t like to critique other journalists—it’s hard enough to make a living in this racket, and the last thing any of us needs is somebody nipping at his heels. And I’m certainly not one of those Chicagoans who thinks only the locals can capture the city’s essence. I thought Ryan Lizza, the New Yorker‘s political writer, did a good job with his July 2008 piece on Barack Obama’s connections to the Daley machine....

“You were never supposed to talk to the media,” says an educator with decades of experience in the Chicago Public Schools. “Some did and some didn’t, and a lot of the old-timers who were willing to take risks are gone. This is not an atmosphere where risk taking is encouraged.” The educator offered me a context for thinking about Bond’s service to the public schools. I heard the atmosphere at CPS is pervaded by trepidation: a lot of old faces have vanished, while new, young, and inexperienced faces popped up in positions of command....

Watching the pop charts can be a form of entertainment in and of itself, kind of like a massive horse race that never ends. On that level it’s been kind of a dud recently. Half of the songs in the top ten are in the same positions they were last week, and Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” and Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” were in the same positions (numbers one and two, respectively) the week before....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The other reaction was to marvel that Rosenthal didn’t know Chicago already has a journalism hall of fame. It was founded in 1985 by Jerry Davis and Jerry Field, retiring and incoming presidents of the Chicago Press Club, and though the press club collapsed two years later, the hall of fame survived, being reconstituted eventually under the aegis of the International Press Club of Chicago....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On its surface it’s a pretty simple song to figure out. The artist is a crack dealer, or at least playing a crack dealer (the far more likely answer, considering the type of cooking that takes up most of his time these days), whose criminal enterprise has grown big enough to draw the attention of the federal government. He reacts to this turn of events with a strange equanimity, and instead of falling back on the violent confrontation that this type of situation often ends in, he undertakes an unorthodox campaign of living so unbelievably large that the agents conducting surveillance on him will, I’m guessing, simply quit the case out of jealousy, if not flat-out die of it....

An arousing aroma intermittently haunts Ukrainian Village’s Ruxbin, though I was never able to identify it, even after working my way through most of the concise menu. At one point I was certain it was coconut vapor rising from the heaping bowls of mussels and togarashi-sprinkled frites that regularly descend into the dining room from the loft kitchen—but I was assured there’s nothing remotely tropical in that garlicky white-wine broth. Whatever that irresistible smell is, it’s almost too much for the snug room to contain....

I missed the Super Bowl last night because I don’t have TV. Oh, and also and football usually bores me to near-suicidal levels. But thanks to our friends at the Internet, I’ve been watching the Prince halftime thing and the best performance overshadowed by it, Common and Kanye breaking out a new jam called “Southside.” Like many Chicagoans, I like to give those dudes shit for repping Chi City from halfway across the continent–and like most people in general I like to bag on their fashion sense, as exemplified by Common’s throwback leather newsboy hat and Kanye’s Polo-Bear-with-a-dookie-chain combo in this clip–but I still love what they do together, and despite the shitty audio quality, I’ve been rocking this song all day....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Viva! Chicago Latin Music Festival celebrates its 21st year this Saturday and Sunday in Grant Park (Columbus and Jackson) with four stages of salsa, merengue, reggaeton, plena, mariachi music, norteño, and other Spanish-language pop. The music begins at noon on Saturday and 1 PM on Sunday, and each evening’s headliners play the Petrillo Music Shell. Saturday’s highlights include La India Canela, Aterciopelados, La Excelencia, and a set at Petrillo honoring late percussionist Manny Oquendo, who played in bands led by Chano Pozo, Tito Puente, and Eddie Palmieri as well as leading his own group, the long-running Conjunto Libre; performers include bassist Andy Gonzalez, trombonist Jimmy Bosch, singer and percussionist Frankie Vazquez, and singer Herman Olivera....

In January the home ? shared with his manager and his manager’s wife in Clio, Michigan, burned to the ground. Among the casualties were the singer’s cockatoo and five of his seven Yorkies–he’s a professional dog breeder and trainer–as well as decades of rock ‘n’ roll memorabilia, including the gold record he and his band earned with “96 Tears,” which hit number one in 1966 and has since entered the garage-rock canon alongside “Louie Louie” and “Gloria....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In 1966 daringly original jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler toured Europe as part of an annual “Newport in Europe” package. Each night his band closed the show, following performances by Stan Getz, Sonny Rollins, Dave Brubeck, Max Roach, and Illinois Jacquet—considering how divisive Ayler’s music was at the time, I suspect the organizers wanted him playing last in case half the crowd raised a stink or walked out....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Some of the best moments on the excellent compilations of 70s music from Nigeria released by the great British label Soundway have come courtesy of the Funkees, a kind of funk-rock band that seemed to draw more inspiration from African-American sounds than native Igbo or Yoruba music. The quintet stoked its fiery tunes with funky polyrhythmic percussion, psychedelic guitar (including extended solos kissed with wah-wah and flanging), driving organ riffs, and infectious, hectoring vocals....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Saturday’s screening of the documentary Parallax Sounds (part of this weekend’s Chicago International Movies & Music Festival) is billed as an “exclusive work-in-progress preview,” and I sure hope that means that the film’s Italian director, Augusto Contento, is far from finished—because as the film stands now, it’s a mess. From everything I’ve heard the documentary is nominally about Chicago’s underground music scene in the 90s and how it was affected by the city’s architecture, but if you were to walk into a screening blind it’s hard to see how you could figure that out....

Leor Galil FeelTrip’s cat head Local label and multimedia collective FeelTrip has steadily been gathering steam since its inception in 2011, but it hit a slight snag during New Year’s Eve: that’s when local cops busted up a party at FeelTrip’s South Loop headquarters. “Inside the place there was probably 300 people,” says FeelTrip cofounder David Beltran, aka producer Starfoxxx. “When the cops came I was almost somewhat relieved because it was too out of control....

Here’s a coincidence: just when public support for Chicago’s 2016 Olympics bid is tanking (according to a recent Trib/WGN poll), along comes Back the Bid Day to perk things up. September 13 is the designated date for this show of orchestrated enthusiasm by some of the city’s elite cultural institutions. On that day only, tickets for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s regular concerts will go for just $20.16 each, as will seats on the Chicago Architecture Foundation’s “2016 Highlights by Bus” tour, which will cruise past potential Olympic sites....

Back in April east-side rapper Keith Cozart uploaded a video to YouTube, “Chief Keef Tweaking Off Soulja Boy Gold Bricks SONG,” that would help make him the most polarizing teenage cultural export Chicago has ever seen. Filmed with a computer camera and set in a room littered with clothes, the video features a dreadlocked 16-year-old brandishing a messy stack of bills, peeling off one after another and waving them in front of the camera—first the Benjamins, then the Grants, then the Jacksons—as Soulja Boy’s Auto-Tune-plastered track leaks out from the computer’s speakers....

Rockman via Wikipedia Marilyn Manson performing in 2009 UPDATE: The parts of a video mentioned in this post that depict Marilyn Manson were taken from his 2012 videos “No Reflection” and “Slo-Mo-Tion.” They are not unreleased footage. Both Eminem and Marilyn Manson were the talk of grade schools in the 1990s. Eminem rapped about hating gay people and hitting women, while Manson was nearly obscured by a fog of bizarre and salacious rumors: that he pissed on audiences at his concerts, that he was actually a hermaphrodite, that he’d had a rib removed so he could suck his own dick....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This year’s International Beethoven Festival kicks into high gear on Saturday with a slew of disparate events, including a performance of Bach’s Saint John’s Passion by one of the fest’s house groups—the Prometheus Baroque Ensemble—conducted by the great German composer Matthias Pintscher at 5 PM. But for me the real excitement arrives on Sunday, where the impressive breadth of the festival, coordinated by founder and artistic director George Lepauw and music director Aurelian Pederzoli (of Spektral Quartet), is on full display....

Bowen Violin Shop Run by Sharon Bowen since 1981, this 470-square-foot shop on the eighth floor of the Hyde Park Bank offers affordable violins, violas, cellos, and accessories, many in a price range accessible to students. The shop also rents and repairs instruments (single-day service is available for bow rehairing). A second location at 410 S. Michigan, opened in 1995 by Sharon’s husband, John, handles strictly repairs. The Hyde Park location is open by appointment only during the hours below....

Mia Mora If you like what Maria Morales is wearing, ask her about it–she might just sell it to you off her back. Much of the stock at her vintage and designer resale shop, Mia Mora, which opened in December across the street from the Fireside Bowl, comes from her own collection, assembled over 30 years of satisfying a serious shopping jones. Her taste is broad, so her acquisitions range from a proper Christian Dior black silk damask suit to a wild pair of yellow-and-red pony-skin boots festooned with brocade and lace (which she says she only wore a couple times)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For last week’s paper I reviewed “Teenie Harris, Photographer,” the new show installed into a first-floor hallway at Harold Washington library. Charles “Teenie” Harris shot pictures for the African-American newspaper the Pittsburgh Courier in the mid-20th century, focusing particularly on a neighborhood called the Hill District, which was home to a thriving black middle class. Its members are whom Harris is concerned with—though the social upheavals of the 60s and onward lurk in the background of this show, they’re secondary to Harris’s chronicle of black social life....