Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If I were Mitt Romney I’d be wicked pissed right now. (“Gosh!” I’d probably say. “Shoot!”) The election is only a few days away and the Republican presidential candidate is in an unfortunate position: to campaign as though the east coast didn’t have more pressing concerns he’d be criticized as insensitive or maybe, in a more optimistic assessment, irrelevant—but in the meantime, there’s really nothing doing....

From An Inn in Tokyo This Saturday at noon, the Music Box will screen Yasujiro Ozu’s An Inn in Tokyo (1935) in its monthly silent-cinema series. It’s a special movie in a number of ways: not only was it the last silent film made by Ozu—one of the greatest of Japanese filmmakers—it was one of the last Japanese silent films, period. And since it’s estimated that 90 percent of Japanese movies made before 1945 are forever lost, it’s one of relatively few examples of its kind still in existence....

Eric Prahl’s Transformers take up about half of his guest room—and that’s only some of them. A good part of the collection, which he estimates tops 1,000 Transformers, he still keeps in a closet. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When he and his wife moved in together, Prahl says, she suggested that he display more of them in different places in the house. But he doesn’t want to end up like Steve Carell’s character in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, so he has a rule: “They have one place and they don’t go outside that room....

In the contemporary New Orleans of Lisa D’Amour’s new drama Airline Highway, given an alternately stagnant and rousing Steppenwolf world premiere, only two types of people exist: the authentics and the inauthentics. Here, as in so many American plays over the past several decades, the authentics are the downtrodden, the unconventional, the penniless, the permanently marginalized. The inauthentics, by contrast, occupy the center wherever they go, remaking the world after their consumerist ideals, shopping at Whole Foods, taking Zumba classes, making crafty candles....

In 2006 a teenage Bay Area rap group called the Pack released the single “Vans.” Essentially a four-minute free advertisement for the shoe company of the same name, it combines an infectious, minimalist beat and a confusing hook: “Got my Vans on, but they look like sneakers.” The song’s bare-bones catchiness and the Pack’s pre-Odd Future black-skate-punk image—I once saw them use the roof of a compact car as a stage for an impromptu live performance, thoroughly trashing it in the process—made “Vans” a hit in the underground rap world....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Typeface” Along with Hoop Dreams director Steve James‘s No Crossover: The Trial of Allen Iverson, the Gene Siskel Film Center screens two more films from local documentary powerhouse Kartemquin Films this week in its “Stranger than Fiction” series. Justine Nagan, who was named Kartemquin’s executive director last year, directs Typeface—a documentary about Two Rivers, Wisconsin’s Hamilton Wood Type Museum, the endangered art of letterpress typography, and the resurgence of craft printing—which has its Chicago premiere in a week long run starting Friday 1/29....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » These are heady times for vaginas, politically and linguistically. Earlier this week state rep Lisa Brown was banned from addressing the Michigan legislature because, according to the speaker, she’d “failed to maintain the decorum of the House of Representatives.” Watch a video of her speech here; Brown thought the punishment was for using the word vagina during a debate over a proposal to restrict abortions after 20 weeks....

Now in its sixth year, Wicker Park Fest features rock, indie pop, electronic music, and DJ sets on three stages this Saturday and Sunday on Milwaukee between North and Wood. The fest runs from noon till 10 PM both days, and the music starts at 1:30 PM Saturday and 2 PM Sunday. House Call Entertainment, talent buyers for the Beat Kitchen and Subterranean, booked the North Stage, where Saturday’s lineup includes the Retribution Gospel Choir, Vampire Hands, the Night Marchers (fronted by the incomparable John Reis, also of Drive Like Jehu, Rocket From the Crypt, and Hot Snakes), and Grand Duchy (Pixies front man Black Francis and his wife Violet Clark, who also play Friday at Subterranean); among the notable acts on the other stages are the New Deal, Future Rock, and Scott Lucas & the Married Men....

It seems like the last thing people want to do these days is exchange money for recorded music. Artists and labels have long considered revenue from band merchandise merely a supplement to money from album sales, but as a September 10 article in the New York Times Magazine pointed out, some are beginning to see merch as the real product, with music just sort of attached to it: You could buy the most recent Of Montreal album, False Priest (Polyvinyl), in the form of a T-shirt with a download code....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Local instrumental metal four-piece Pelican is preparing to release its fifth LP, Forever Becoming, which is its first without founding member and guitarist Laurent Schroeder-Lebec (Dallas Thomas has since joined the band). Yesterday Noisey premiered a new tune off the album called “The Cliff,” and not only is it today’s 12 O’Clock Track, it’s also quite heavy. Back in June guitarist Trevor de Brauw told Gossip Wolf that Forever Becoming is “considerably heavier than our last couple of albums,” and “The Cliff” fits the bill; it begins with plenty of low, rumbling bass and gracefully transitions into a serene postrock burner that keeps its huge, hard pulse intact....

A couple years ago Ravenswood upstart Nhu Lan Bakery snatched banh mi supremacy away from this venerable Vietnamese bakery, but Ba Le Sandwich Shop continued to thrive, benefiting from a prime location—albeit in a dark, cramped space—at the mouth of Little Saigon. Now, since moving one door south in April into the roomier confines vacated by Thai Grocery, Ba Le has not only stepped up its sandwich assembly but expanded its menu offerings in a bright, modish space with plenty of indoor seating, a patio, and even a tight parking lot overseen on weekends by a cheerful but incongruous rent-a-cop....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » CEO Sam Zell said the company ran into a “perfect storm — a precipitous decline in revenue and a tough economy coupled with a credit crisis that makes it extremely difficult to support our debt.” The Cubs and Wrigley Field weren’t included in the Chapter 11 filing, and the Cubs promptly released a statement saying, “The Chicago Cubs are not included in Tribune’s restructuring and the business and baseball operations of the Cubs continue independent of Tribune’s decision to restructure its debt....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But Eddie Vrdolyak just got probation. And unlike Vrdolyak, who’d pleaded guilty to enriching himself through a “finder’s fee” he’d done nothing to earn in a juicy real estate deal, Patrick Slattery and three other city officials who went down with him hadn’t “been censured threee times by the Illinois Supreme Court for scamming legal clients and/or the courts,” Marin noted, and hadn’t “schemed to make money beyond keeping their city jobs....

I discovered Cross Record too late. I say this mainly because singer-songwriter Emily Cross, the heart of the band, plans to move to Austin in August with her fiance, Dan Duszynski. That’s a drag, given that Chicago has yet to fully embrace her. Since the release of last year’s hauntingly frail Be Good, Cross has been inching onto people’s radar screens, and now she seems primed to follow a trajectory similar to that of fellow Chicagoan Angel Olsen, who recently signed to Jagjaguwar....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Colon had reason to enjoy the moment. He’d run for reelection this winter with all the baggage of a sitting official–a public record of council votes, zoning and development decisions, and campaign contributions available for dissection and critique–and few of the assets. For one, his leading opponent was Vilma Colom, the former alderman Colon had defeated after a bitter race in 2003 (and lost to in his first stab at the City Council, in 1999)....

Every time I go out into the world to talk about the evils of tax increment financing in Chicago, one of the first questions the audience asks is whether there’s anyone, anywhere, willing to fight this monstrosity. Mayfield, a Democrat, recently introduced a proposal that would take a step toward reform by keeping schools out of the TIF equation. “I used to be on the board of education in Waukegan,” says Mayfield....

The Reader received numerous responses to the April 6 cover story “Who Should You Trust to Train Your Dog?” about the arrest of dog trainer Ami Moore. The following are excerpts from some of them. It should be recognized that the vast majority of trainers, whatever their methods, are at worst ineffective. That said, harm can be done, and an inexperienced or temperamentally unstable trainer wielding an electric collar is more likely to do harm than an equally unskilled trainer training on-leash....

Restaurant listings are culled from the Reader Restaurant Finder, an online database of more than 4,200 Chicago-area restaurants. Restaurants are reviewed by staff, contributors, and (where noted) individual Reader Restaurant Raters. Though reviewers try to reflect the Raters’ input, reviews should be considered one person’s opinion; the Raters’ collective opinions are best expressed in the numbers. Eve 840 N. Wabash | 312-266-3383 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When it opened early last spring I thought of Tallulah—Troy Graves’s comeback from Meritage—as a relative bright spot on Lincoln Square’s increasingly mediocre restaurant row....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » God may have begun punishing me for my sins last week, when I had to sit through a severely stupid horror flick called The Reaping. Produced by veteran crapmeister Joel Silver, it’s one of those suspense films so lacking in suspense that its meager scares have to be augmented with high-decibel blasts to keep the audience awake. And like a number of recent horror items grasping for some sort of legitimacy (The Order, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist), it thumps the Bible so hard you expect the pages to fly out....

But that was unacceptable to liberals—both on November 22 and the days afterward and for years to come. Will notes that the New York Times promptly offered its own explanation in the editorial “Spiral of Hate”: at fault was “the spirit of madness and hate that struck down” Kennedy, for which all Americans must bear the “shame.” Comments Will, “Hitherto a doctrine of American celebration and optimism, liberalism would now become a scowling indictment: Kennedy was killed by America’s social climate whose sickness required ‘punitive liberalism....