You’ve probably seen Jimmy Whispers‘s street art around town. Since spring 2012 he’s been pasting up his crude and blocky cartoonlike drawings, which usually involve one or all of the following: a handgun, the Chicago Bulls logo, a pot leaf, an ice cream cone, a shark, and the phrase “Summer in Pain.” He’s also a musician, though you might not know it unless you’ve happened to see one of his shows—he hasn’t released anything, and unless you count two Chic-a-Go-Go clips, none of his lo-fi pop songs are online....

Last year’s double disc of dance remixes was hit-or-miss, but Olympia-based songstress Mirah is back to form with Share This Place: Songs and Observations (K Records), due out later this month. Conceived as the soundtrack to a series of animated shorts by filmmaker Britta Johnson, it’s a swoony collection of bedroom orchestrals with Spanish guitar flourishes, featuring nimble bass and cello work by Lori Goldston and Lyle Hanson (billed here as Spectratone International)....

FESTIVAL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Well on the way to becoming a Chicago institution, the Music Box Massacre is an annual 24-hour marathon of classic horror movies, vintage trailers, and personal appearances, with a collectibles market in the theater lobby. This year’s guests include the Chiodo Brothers, whose puppet work was featured in Killer Klowns From Outer Space (1988) and later Team America: World Police (2004)....

In this touring retrospective, at the Museum of Contemporary Art through September 13, Danish artist Olafur Eliasson often seems more scientist than artist—and we’re the guinea pigs. His “uniquely participatory works,” says the PR, “examine the intersection of nature and science.” And his imposing sculptures and installations even look like scientific experiments, in true postmodern fashion exposing whatever projectors, cords, and electronic control units are needed to make them function....

Obviously the big news of the day is that Osama bin Laden is dead and the federal government’s already hard at work rolling back a decade’s worth of fear-based, civil-rights-infringing legislation, as it should be. Although it smacks a bit of bloodthirstiness, it’s only human to feel some sort of catharsis at hearing that a terrible man who’s done terrible, terrible things has met the violent sort of end that he probably deserves....

The first time I walked into Badou Senegalese Cuisine in Rogers Park, the eponymous owner Badara “Badou” Diakhate was seated at a table in the empty dining room prepared to dive into a heaping plate of rice, collard greens, and smoked turkey. If you saw it you might think it looked like something you could order at Ruby’s in Garfield Park. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Diakhate calls this dish “Badou’s Senegalese Soul Food,” and at the time it wasn’t even on his menu—it was just something he was playing around with....

The music industry has changed a lot since 1982, when Polygram chairman Irwin Steinberg and Down Beat publisher Chuck Suber started AEMMP Records, a student-run label at Columbia College that doubles as a music-business prep course. (At the time Suber was also head of the graduate half of the college’s Arts, Entertainment & Media Management Program, which gave AEMMP its name.) The majors were monoliths that seemed like they’d stand forever, and the biggest threat they faced was home taping....

Kelvin “Shorty” Wallace had been on an ugly run for more years than he cared to count. “So I’m like, ‘Well, shit, that sounds good.’ He said, ‘I’ll pay for the cab—I’m gonna send the cab right to you.’” On a May afternoon 20 months later, Shorty’s in the living room of a nondescript brick three-flat on a dead-end street in south-suburban Calumet City—a recovery home for addicts enrolled in a program called “It’s About Change....

I’ve rarely been as proud as I was the day I stumbled on the combination of crunchy peanut butter and Filipino banana ketchup on toast. On paper, I don’t expect everyone to immediately understand the synergistic genius of this pairing, but I’ll wager few would fail to stop short and ponder it if it were listed on a menu somewhere. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » These tersely described, oddly fascinating juxtapositions are like magnets for the novelty-obsessed diner desperate to have her eyes opened wide by something new....

It was a polarized year in music. Pop was comically grandiose, its factory settings hardwired to “spectacle” (Gaga, Watch the Throne), while underground rock wallowed in 90s grunge—the only bands who weren’t nostalgic were oldster acts revivified and coasting on that nostalgia. But a smattering of releases this year—all of which went almost entirely unheralded—did more than recycle the familiar, instead looking forward or culling sounds from unlikely inspirations. Here are some of the best of 2011:...

TBS Just for Laughs Chicago runs from Tuesday, June 11, through Sunday, June 16, and offers a daily embarrassment of comics—round about 185 altogether, both local and national. Most events take place at Stage 773 (1225 W. Belmont), with a few big names at venues like the Chicago Theatre and Park West. Our critics’ picks are below; a full schedule is at justforlaughschicago.com, where you can also buy tickets. Everything here is $15 unless otherwise noted....

Jazz on Jackson Stage The Milton Suggs Philosophy Noon On his third album, this summer’s terrific Lyrical, Volume 1 (Skiptone), Chicagoan Milton Suggs affirms his place as one of the best jazz singers to emerge in the past decade. Most of the songs are classic vocalese—Suggs has written words to themes by the likes of Wayne Shorter, Blue Mitchell, and Lee Morgan—but he avoids excessive improvised ornamentation, instead focusing on careful, soulful phrasing that’s redolent of Donny Hathaway more than Johnny Hartman....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » STONE: There’s two ordinances. One may be in Rules [the Committee on Committees, Rules and Ethics]. Mine is in Budget, because the committee’s name is Budget and Administration [actually, Budget and Government Operations]. And you’ve got to understand, the repeal of that ordinance has absolutely nothing to do with [the Committee on Health, which held last year’s debate on the foie gras ban]....

What are plastic bags made out of? What’s better—paper or plastic bags? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Just about everything can be recycled, but recycling becomes less likely as the cost of doing it goes up. Demand for bags is low because they offer a low payoff by volume, and contamination—scraps of food, paper, and other trash—corrupts the recycling process, making it more costly for processors....

Discovery Channel Lives on the edge, loves the Lord Over the weekend, 29-year-old terminal brain cancer patient Brittany Maynard made final her highly publicized decision to end her life before its quality could be completely ravaged by her illness. Several doctors had told Maynard that even if they intervened she had no chance of surviving, so she decided to die gracefully, on her own terms, and as an activist at the forefront of the “death with dignity” movement....

Having spent the better part of a week asking teachers why they’d risk a public backlash by going on strike, I’ve concluded that the answer is best summed up by what one told me at their Labor Day rally: “Mayor Emanuel’s pushed us to the limit. He’s the world’s biggest asshole.” I just read an open letter “To the Leaders of the Chicago Teachers Union from Leaders of the Faith Community....

Female filmmakers are marginalized in every genre, but horror is a particularly male domain. Tod Browning, James Whale, Val Lewton, George Romero, John Carpenter—from the silent era onward, men have shaped the horror movie, often around the sound of a woman screaming. According to Mubi.com, women have directed only about three dozen horror features, the most notable being Kathryn Bigelow’s gloomy 1987 vampire thriller Near Dark (Bigelow went on to win an Oscar for The Hurt Locker)....

Broadway Idiot, which documents the adaptation of Green Day’s acclaimed album American Idiot into a stage musical, tries to gin up some tension by proposing a divide between rock and legitimate theater that hasn’t really existed for 20 years. Ever since The Who’s Tommy took Broadway by storm in April 1993, producers have been trying to recycle boomer musical staples into money-minting shows, and the Green Day album, which reaches back to both the Who and the Clash, is the most palatable brand of punk rock around....

Ford Center for the Performing Arts/Oriental Theatre 24 W. Randolph 312-977-1701 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Seriously myopic, I like to sit near the stage for live theater. But seriously cheap, I hate to pay New York prices for Broadway in Chicago productions. If the show’s at my favorite BIC venue, the deliriously elaborate Oriental Theatre, there’s often a way to get a perfectly fine seat for as little as $25....

“Billie Jean” by Robbie Fulks robbiefulks.com Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Happy, Robbie Fulks’s album of Michael Jackson covers, had been in the can for almost a decade by the time he released it this spring—previously, in 2004, he’d canceled a planned release because another round of child-molestation accusations had surfaced. The collection takes a dizzying variety of approaches to Jackson’s songs, including bluegrass, power pop, blues-rock, and country....