Chalk up at least one for the preservationists. They scored a first-round victory last week, when the Commission on Chicago Landmarks finally committed to putting Bertrand Goldberg’s Prentice Hospital building on its agenda this fall. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The landmarks commission’s announcement, made by chairman Rafael M. Leon at its September 6 meeting, comes after a year of lobbying by preservationists and in the midst of a massive counteroffensive by Northwestern....

Did Park District officials tell alderman Vi Daley about their plans to build a soccer field in her ward? It’s not a trivial question: the board has agreed to allow a private school exclusive access to public land. Well, was the alderman notified or not? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For her part, Daley’s sticking to her story: she says she didn’t know the Park District was installing the soccer field until this spring when Crain’s Chicago Business columnist Greg Hinz called her for comment....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One of my favorite recent books is Dale DeGroff’s The Essential Cocktail: The Art of Mixing Drinks, a lavishly photographed how-to by “King Cocktail,” who probably more than anyone is responsible for the current cocktail renaissance. So I jumped at the chance to shake the legend’s hand at the local launch party last night at the Violet Hour....

UPDATE: Chris Drew appeared in court on Wednesday, September 22, where a tentative date of October 22 was set for a hearing on his motion to suppress evidence derived from a recording device police confiscated from him. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » By last winter Drew had taken his campaign into a new phase, mounting a direct challenge to the peddling law by provoking a test case....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The slowed real estate market was a big culprit–the real estate transfer tax will pull in $51 million less this year than it did in 2007. People are also spending less on gas, cigarettes, and bottled water, so tax monies on those items aren’t coming in as expected. Perhaps what was most striking about the announcement was that budget officials refused to outline any strategies for coping with the deficit....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Austrian-American Glawischnig excels as a support player, pumping out the crucial heartbeat of the music from the background. It’s a role he’s expertly filled over the years for the likes of James Moody, Ray Barretto, and Stefon Harris. The bassist cut his teeth, though, as a long-time collaborator of Puerto Rican saxophonist David Sanchez, and it’s in a potent New York scene of post-Latin-jazz heavies that Glawischnig has thrived—it’s partly why McCaslin used the bassist on records like Soar and In Pursuit, which integrate a matrix of Latin and South American rhythms....

For 2009 the same financial pressures we’re all feeling have forced the Chicago Blues Festival to slim down from four days to three—but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Past fests have sometimes been spread pretty thin across those four days. Many artists played multiple times on multiple stages, and some sets ran so long they wore out their welcome. The need to keep expenses down also seems to have motivated the festival’s organizers to lean more heavily on local acts, many of whom aren’t well-known outside their immediate south- and west-side communities—a move that should appease critics who’ve complained that the fest ought to pay more attention to indigenous strains of blues....

friday6 saturday7 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » CALLA These New Yorkers have been around since 1997, but only after they signed to Beggars Banquet a couple years ago did their intentions finally become clear: they’re trying to make goth respectable to the indie crowd. Not that Calla didn’t flirt with gloom in the early days–their second full-length came out on Michael Gira’s Young God label–but back then their music had more of an experimental bent, with the whooshing subway-tunnel atmospherics you used to hear in Wharton Tiers productions....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Blagojevich was in a position to offer something he figured Zell wanted. Zell needed “the proceeds from the sale of the Cubs to pay down debt associated with the Tribune Company acquisition” — that’s the $13 billion in total debt that prompted the Tribune Company Monday to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. And the Illinois Finance Authority (IFA) could possibly help the sale along by offering financial assistance “relating to the financing or sale of Wrigley Field....

I was talking to a guy online who seemed to be pretty cool. I decided I wanted to see what he was like in person, so we met for coffee. Instead of the six-foot-tall, lanky guy I was expecting to see, I met up with a five-foot-four guy. (Guys, a tip: don’t lie about your height. It just makes you seem ridiculous.) I had the first that’s-kind-of-weird gut reaction, but hey, maybe he was self-conscious about his height....

Tiaras Tiaras is a band made up of a bunch of dudes who have been kicking around the San Francisco scuzzy garage-rock scene for years (including Adam Finken, who used to be in one of my favorite bands from that side of the states, Blasted Canyons), and next month they’ll release their debut LP on Mt. St. Mtn. Records. Today’s 12 O’Clock Track is “Thought I Could Know,” a preview tune from their self-titled record, and if you’re anything like me you’ll be expecting it to be a revved-up, psychy Thee Oh Sees clone—which is a sound that way too many Bay Area bands tend to gravitate towards....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Anyway–Eugene Robinson thinks Rev. Wright’s ego is running away with him, and that his attempt to represent the black church is presumptuous. Pam Spaulding called his “playing the dozens” at the NPC “a public unraveling of the id.” Bob Herbert called it “a narcissist’s dream.” That’s all strategy, though; you have to look far and wide to find anyone addressing Rev....

Lester Bangs once said that Van Morrison “is interested, obsessed with how much musical or verbal information he can compress into a small space, and, almost, conversely, how far he can spread one note, word, sound, or picture.” Can we get real and say the same about Glenn Jones? Is there much to “Show Me”? No, there isn’t. But Jones has the same obsession with the texture and variation of a single word as Morrison....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As you may know, Kill Hannah front man Mat Devine has put the glamdustrial group on hold to take a part in the $65 million Broadway show Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, which is directed by one of the people behind the mega-successful stage adaptation of the Lion King and features music by a couple of upstart rock ‘n’ rollers named Bono and the Edge....

Getting into your other question, the first chapter of the book came out of my master’s [dissertation], which was about the history of Brazilian cinema. I often mention a researcher named Paulo Emilio Sales Gomes, who founded the film program at the University of Brasilia. He said that we can’t talk about an independent-cinema history in Brazil since the country wasn’t economically independent for most of the 20th century. Now I teach cinema history there too, and I start my courses by saying that Hollywood cinema and Brazilian cinema have always been inversely related....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There are several special revival screenings around town this weekend, all of them offering great conversation topics for postmovie walks in the September breeze. Tonight in Hyde Park, South Side Projections and Poetry magazine present Seeing the Light, a program of three experimental classics inspired by poetry (I described the lineup at greater length yesterday), while in Lakeview, the Music Box hosts a midnight screening of the still-provocative Bone (1972) with writer-director Larry Cohen (who also made the provocative It’s Alive and God Told Me To) scheduled to attend....

You wouldn’t expect to find a major international news story being broken by a house of worship. But when Michael Millenson arrived at his North Shore synagogue August 2 he came across the following item in the weekly bulletin: Whatever danger Iranian missiles do or don’t pose to Europe, they certainly preoccupy Israel. Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called Israel a “Zionist regime…heading toward annihilation” that should be “wiped off the map....

Joong Boo Market Snack Corner 3333 N. Kimball 774-478-5566 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On Kimball just north of where the Kennedy and the Blue Line cross Belmont you’ll find Joong Boo, primarily an Asian grocery—bigger than a market, smaller than a supermarket—that can satisfy most of your weekly shopping needs. In addition to a wide selection of dry goods (including plenty of novel cookies and chips) and a decent produce section, it has a butcher, a fishmonger, and a large kitchenware annex....

The Reader’s Choice: Le Dress Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This past year was more notable for store closings than store openings. But the owners of Le Dress have a solid concept—just dresses!—that may have helped to insulate them from the retail downturn. (Wonder when other entrepreneurs will jump on the idea—Just Pants, anybody?) It’s actually brilliant—women are always in need of a dress for something or other....

Mike Sula Brandade, Gather One would think 4539 North Lincoln would be a veritable gold mine for restaurateurs who know what they’re doing, positioned as it is directly across from (and next to) the Old Town School of Folk Music. But the space wasn’t too kind to Troy Graves’s otherwise worthy Tallulah, or to Stephan and Nicole Outrequin, who launched their increasingly formulaic chain of French restaurants there, but then abandoned the location for other neighborhoods....