Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Every once in a while, I get a press release that thoroughly rubs me the wrong way. Case in point: today’s invitation to an invite-only listening party for the new Marillion album. Yeah, don’t everybody ooh and ah at once. First off, it’s in New York. Second, the album’s not out till late April. “Somewhere Else is the latest twist in a 23-year-long history of a group who has held on to the conviction that what they’re doing MEANS something real....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last week, on a particularly bad day, I told Peter that skipping one Tuesday market at Lincoln Square would be like getting an entire week off. The haggling and tight quarters get to me. I left a voice mail for Peter: “Hey, I just wanted to say that I fucking hate this market right now and also do you think the cups to sample cider are on the truck somewhere or did you take them off?...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Colin Dunn at Treehugger reports that “Discardia is a cyclical, floating holiday (it happens several times per year)…. [It’s a] time to get rid of things (by recycling, FreeCycling & giving away, rather than pitching it, of course) that no longer add value to your life, shed bad habits, let go of emotional baggage and generally lighten your load…....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Just kidding! He didn’t actually say any of that. But Lori Healey, formerly the mayor’s chief of staff and now the president of the Chicago 2016 bid committee, told aldermen today that the city would be paying for the proposed Olympic Village with TIF dollars. “If the city is selected to host the 2016 Summer Games, it will carve out a new TIF district from the existing Bronzeville TIF to help fund new roads, sewers, and other infrastructure needed for the Olympic Village,” she said, according to an article in Crain’s....

Beer Temple owner Christopher Quinn has been using rare brews to build a name for himself since he and his wife, Margaret, opened the craft-beer store at the beginning of the year—and it’s working. On opening day he offered samples of Westvleteren XII and Dark Lord Russian Imperial Stout (two of the rarest beers in the world) from his private stash; for the official grand opening in February he pulled out all the stops, giving out samples of more than 30 unusual and hard-to-find specimens, including Sam Adams Utopia, Bells Batch 9,000 and 10,000, Goose Island Bourbon County Bramble Rye, and Three Floyds cognac-barrel-aged Dark Lord with chiles....

The usually zipped-up local art world got a jolt two weeks ago when federal agents raided the Kass/Meridian Gallery at 325 W. Superior. It was a surreal scene, with a platoon of U.S. Postal Service police and the FBI lugging framed works by the likes of Chagall and Dalí out into the snowy street. The official explanation, courtesy of an FBI spokesman, is that the agents executed a search warrant as part of an ongoing investigation—there were no arrests made and no charges filed, and documents have been sealed....

Caroline Davis had been a saxophonist for nearly 20 years before she decided to focus her energies on playing jazz full-time. For more than a decade Davis, 31, was an academic first and foremost, but after earning her PhD from Northwestern University in 2010, she began cultivating her talent in earnest—and it’s blossomed spectacularly. Her first album as a leader, Live Work & Play, comes out early next month, and it reveals her to be one of the city’s strongest and most exciting jazz saxophonists....

“There’s more drama here than there is onstage” is how Stuart Gordon, founder of Chicago’s legendary Organic Theater Company, described the battle he and a starry, mostly west-coast consortium have been waging to preserve the little basement theater in Uptown’s Hull House Center that once was Organic’s home. Foremost among the arguments for preservation is the theater’s place in Chicago history. Built and opened in 1966 under the auspices of director Bob Sickinger, it’s the only remaining one of the Hull House group of theaters that gave birth to the city’s now-famous off-Loop scene....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Yesterday Mayor Daley weighed in on Christopher Kozicki, the former building department employee who got a cushy job with the planning department after testifying in former patronage chief Robert Sorich’s corruption trial last year. During the trial Kozicki admitted to having altered the rating of the 19-year-old son of a high-ranking union official to ensure that he’d be hired as a city building inspector....

This year’s Festival Cubano, expanding to three days in Riis Park, kicks off its music programming Friday at 4 PM with a six-hour lineup of more than 40 artists and DJs celebrating the history of house—which seems like an odd choice, even considering the importance of Latinos in the development of the genre, given that the event is ostensibly devoted to the music of Cuba. Fortunately the fest has booked some important figures, including Hot Mix 5 cofounder Kenny “Jammin’” Jason and mid-80s member Frankie “Hollywood” Rodriguez, Keith Nunnally of J....

In late October on the Mad Decent blog, Dirty South Joe of the New Jersey DJ collective Brick Bandits posted about a crew of Chicago DJs and producers calling themselves Ghetto Division. He said they were “creating their own lane in the club music game” and posted seven tracks by members Charlie Glitch, D-51, Maddjazz, and DJ Rob 3, aka Rob Threezy. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Those factors, combined with fact that all seven tracks were bangers, got people buzzing....

David Henry Hwang, who wrote the 1988 Broadway hit M. Butterfly, penned this smart, funny, touching play, which considers the tangle of sex, spirituality, obedience, hypocrisy, morality, and injustice involved in the process of seismic social change. When a wealthy merchant in 1918 China embraces Western values, his conversion to Christianity dramatically reshapes the lives of his family–especially his three wives, only one of whom he can remain married to. Presented on Broadway in 1998, Golden Child is getting its midwest premiere from the adventurous little Silk Road Theatre Project, which makes it into crackling drama that melds cultural commentary with urgent, often witty storytelling....

Lisa Dillman’s new play is about half-right. The part that works resembles Barbara Ehrenreich’s classic report on middle-class insecurity, Fear of Falling, reimagined as domestic dramedy. Medical transcriptionist Holly and plant worker Marty are a childless couple tending to Marty’s senile dad and facing the threat of unemployment from outsourcing. Cheryl Graeff is remarkably down-to-earth as Holly, almost making the character work by gamely taking on both her Laura Petrie-esque pratfalls and increasing emotional stagnation....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Vintage soul has benefited greatly from committed crate diggers like Chicago’s exemplary Numero Group, who keep uncovering lost gems and putting them in context for us. To meet the public’s natural desire to experience the music live, rather than only on CDs or scratchy old 45s, a rash of new soul-influenced artists (Amy Winehouse, Alice Russell, Duffy) have arisen, alongside veteran singers getting a second chance at fame (Sharon Jones, Charles Walker)....

Like most artists whose music has been called “chillwave,” Dexter Tortoriello chafes at the term—unsurprising, given that it was coined by Carles, the brutally sarcastic persona of an anonymous blogger at Hipster Runoff. Even the critics who rushed to cover the style in the wake of last year’s South by Southwest seemed to enjoy predicting that it would be a flash in the pan. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Geoffrey G. O’Brien’s People on Sunday was written partially in response to violence leveled at political protesters—O’Brien among them—at the University of California-Berkeley, where he teaches poetry. But in his own poems he largely confronts the unexploded terrors: the workweek slipping into the weekend, not as relief from the grind but merely a “distraction” owing to “the way we’re taught to imagine days / As reprieves from other days.” This precludes us from doing our own writing on the wall—although “here is a wall and some chalk,” and what the wall ought to say is that corporations have replaced both democracy and the voice of God....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Fans of the Classic Film Series at LaSalle Bank (now Bank of America) in Irving Park may remember Scott Marks, who programmed the series from 1995 to 2000. Marks was part of the Chicago film scene for years: back in the 80s he managed the old Parkway revival house at Clark and Diversey, and in the 90s he taught history of film and animation at Columbia College....

ON THE WEALTH OF NATIONS P.J. O’Rourke (Atlantic monthly press) Info 312-606-0750 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » By comparison, P.J. O’Rourke’s On The Wealth of Nations, the first volume in the new Atlantic Monthly Press series “Books That Changed the World,” runs a brisk 256 pages and weighs a feathery 12 ounces. The organizing principle is simple: O’Rourke reads Adam Smith so you don’t have to, summarizing the salient points, surveying his influence, and considering pertinent biographical data in such a way as to make the whole enterprise more entertaining than an economics homework assignment....

“I dream of the day when there aren’t any standardized tests,” Daisy Maass is telling me. “That would be an amazing classroom. We could have so much fun, and we’d learn so much.” Daisy’s mother, Marlene Martin, has long been opposed to the proliferation of standardized testing in Chicago’s public schools. But only recently did she learn that a parent could opt her child out. The decision was Daisy’s as well as her parents’....

Romantics say information wants to be free—the way the Sioux and the buffalo once were, before the west was tamed. But Steve Gibson has a different idea. A Las Vegas attorney, Gibson might as well wear a tin star. He’s a man with a cause—he means to bring law and order to the Internet. Righthaven v. Angle was the 116th suit Righthaven has filed since March 13, and it’s filed at least eight since—the website righthavenlawsuits keeps a running tally....