Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The famously sober Frederick Wiseman takes it off, takes it all off, with Crazy Horse, a documentary about the venerable Parisian nude cabaret. It’s the subject of our Reader Recommends box this week. You’ll also find a long review of Oren Moverman’s Rampart, starring Woody Harrelson as an out-of-control LAPD officer, and new capsule reviews for Chico & Rita, a Spanish-British animation feature that’s up for an Oscar on Sunday; Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, a sequel to the 2007 hit; Hell and Back Again, about a U....

Ice Cube Press The clerihew is a four-line poem with an AABB rhyme scheme that always begins with the subject’s name. The subject is always a famous person. It was first invented by the English crime writer Edward Clerihew Bentley, who felt that limericks had become too dirty and that young people needed a more wholesome form in which to write deliberately bad poetry with the most ridiculous rhymes possible....

If fiction tells a lie to get to the truth, traditional journalism/non-fiction/etc is supposed to be truths that tell the truth. But it’s more complicated than that. Journalism is a very thin veneer of a very particular concept of civilization sitting uncomfortably atop a boundlessly strange world. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » So I understand the impulse behind :Vocalo, I really do, for the same reasons I have very mixed feelings about online comment sections....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Legendary New Orleans metal act Eyehategod is in town this weekend, playing back-to-back Cobra Lounge shows this Saturday and Sunday. The band formed in 1988, creating a doomy, molasses-slow sludge metal racket that was as heavy and intense as it was terrifying. Highly publicized drug addictions and criminal records made the band’s loathsome and misanthropic moods and lyrics seem all the more raw and real—a friend of mine who caught them at Fireside Bowl in the mid-90’s said that he was legitimately scared of the band....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Apparently everyone in Chicago was at the Congress Theater on Thursday for the Refused reunion tour. Hell, even I was there, and I hate Refused. That said, I’ve always kind of dug the scene around Refused in their native Sweden. One of my favorite records of 2006 was Alienated by the Vicious, a no-frills punk band with Sara Almgren, a member of (International) Noise Conspiracy, on guitar....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Peter Margasak pointed out that there’s some great Christmas music when he wrote about Marvin Gaye’s “Purple Snowflakes” for yesterday’s 12 O’Clock Track, and I for one wish I could’ve heard that tune years ago. Christmas music is so tied to a religious holiday I have no emotional attachment to that I’ve never been able to get hooked on most of it; instead, I’ve taken to holiday tunes that barely resemble the kind of seasonal classics that fill the air this time of year....

Amidst all of the list making and complaining about list making that occupies music critics at the end of every year, a couple of collections were passed around that proved 2012 still had some potential left to blow open our minds. One was the unauthorized triple-album-length collection of rarities by the singer Cassie, assembled by fans with the intention of proving her place in the emerging avant-R&B scene alongside artists like the Weeknd, who have so far attracted more critical attention....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tonight there’s Irvin Mayfield & the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra at Chicago Theatre, Swearin’ at Township, Johnny Rawls at Buddy Guy’s Legends, and ShowYouSuck’s Dude Bro release party at the Hideout (Gossip Wolf has more info on that show). Tomorrow night you can take in sets from High on Fire at Metro, Mono at Bottom Lounge, or Hungarian State Folk Ensemble at Auditorium Theatre....

The sixth annual Caribbean Festival presents reggae, calypso, gospel, R & B, hip-hop, reggaeton, and more this Friday through Sunday in Union Park (1501 W. Randolph). Though the lineups include quite a few local artists and regular Chicago visitors, each night wraps up with a high-powered out-of-town headliner or three: Friday it’s Kingston reggae duo Tanto Metro & Devonte and New York “reggae-soul” band Leon & the Peoples (led by Leon Robinson, who starred in Disney’s Cool Runnings), Saturday it’s the legendary Beres Hammond and Jamaican roots-reggae band Culture (featuring Kenyatta Hill and Lenya Wilks), and Sunday it’s more reggae with Tarrus Riley, who’s joined by Duane Stephenson, saxophonist Dean Fraser, and special guest Bar-Bee....

From Winsor McCay’s The Pet (1921) As part of the Chicago Alternative Comics Expo (or CAKE, as the organizers call it), the Eyeworks Festival of Experimental Animation will present Parallel Lines, a program of shorts that “highlight the overlap between alternative comics and experimental animation.” The selections skew towards recent work, though there are a few classics on the lineup as well, namely a 1921 short by Winsor McCay (one of the founding fathers of comic art) called The Pet and some mid-70s work by Kathy Rose and George Griffin....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’m back from Byzantine Europe — Istanbul, Athens — as dangerously clearheaded about home as an American can get only on the road. Now I see plainly what’s wrong with the press in Chicago, and the root of the problem is the little boxes the product’s vended in, especially the elegant “street furniture” that holds sway downtown. Newspapers don’t belong in showcases: State Street isn’t Tiffany’s and the Tribune and Sun-Times and Herald and Reader aren’t Rolex watches and diamond rings....

Gossip Wolf is a big fan of Cafe Mustache in Logan Square—it’s a great spot for coffee, food, LPs, cassettes, and relaxing hangs. The cafe is also a music venue, and despite the low-key vibe of shows there, it can get mobbed—so it wants to expand into an adjacent storefront. The folks behind Cafe Mustache have taken to Kickstarter to raise the $20,000 they need to pay for permits and hire an architect and a contractor....

East-side drill-scene wunderkind, YouTube sensation, and brand-new Interscope signee Chief Keef is having the best summer of any 16-year-old in the history of the known universe. How do we know? Twitter, of course! As the saying goes, to the victor go the spoils—and judging by his feed, the Chief’s been spreading the spoils around. And why not? He’s got lettuce stacked like a fucking Dominick‘s! Dude feels like taking his sister out for a mega shopping expedition?...

There’s No Jose Here: Following the Hidden Lives of Mexican Immigrants | Gabriel Thompson (Nation Books) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Thompson is a Brooklyn-based journalist who has written for the Brooklyn Rail, New York magazine, the Nation, and In These Times (where I’m an editor, though I haven’t worked with him). Throughout There’s No Jose Here he avoids taking a stand on the immigration debate....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A few days earlier, she posted about her grad-school office-mate Jeff, “precisely the teacher that the talking ed-heads and columnists say we desperately need: a bright, well-prepared high school science specialist” who used to teach in Cincinnati: “The plan was voted down in May of 2002, by 96% of Cincinnati teachers. Jeff believes he was one of only two teachers in his high school who voted for the plan....

Before Roe v. Wade, between 1969 and ’73, several Chicago women ran the radical group Jane, which offered relatively safe, cheap abortions. Paula Kamen’s 1993 script, made up of monologues and brief scenes, is based on interviews with Jane members and women who’d had clandestine abortions, often gruesome and humiliating experiences. This play illuminates just how bad the bad old days were, but it’s flat and didactic: it feels like 95 percent exposition, 5 percent drama....

The Polish intellectual Leszek Kolakowski has just died in Oxford, England, at the age of 81. I was not familiar with him, and so I am poorly positioned to scold the Tribune and Sun-Times for posting the same wire-service obituary that neglected to mention that at one time Kolakowski taught in Chicago. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But he did, from 1981 to 1994 at the University of Chicago, primarily as a member of the Committee on Social Thought (as was mentioned in the New York Times’s staff written obit)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I feel a bit bad calling out Steinberg, because of all the hairshirts being donned, Steinberg’s is unusually sincere and about the only one I’ve read that seems to evince actual guilt feelings. But I think his sneers at the anti-war contingent are a vital part of the history of this fiasco. It’s not that I don’t understand the logic; anyone who’s been to high school will recognize it....

Lead Story Questionable Judgments Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In Hamtramck, Michigan, in October, Judge Paul Paruk told plaintiff Ginnah Muhammad, reportedly a devout Muslim, that he would dismiss her small-claims suit against a rental car company if she wouldn’t take off her veil before testifying. Paruk insisted that the veil, which the plaintiff regularly wears in public, would keep him from gauging her credibility....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Paul Tough profiled her in a recent New York Times magazine. It’s news to a lot of people (many in her adoring audience are teachers) that there are unspoken rules about how upper-, middle-, and lower-class people behave. “In a few words, Payne explains how each class sees each concept. Humor in poverty? About people and sex. In the middle class?...