Singer and guitarist Jim Elkington has been an important figure in the Chicago music scene for years, but lately it seems like he’s everywhere. He settled permanently here in 2000, moving from his native London, at which point he was leading sophisticated pop-rock band the Zincs, which dissolved a couple years ago. Since 2002 he’s been working with Eleventh Dream Day’s Janet Bean in the Horse’s Ha, where he displays his British folk sensibilities most strongly....

Benjy Russell Fielded You know about that Boards of Canada mystery release thing I blogged about recently? It looks like it’s finally wrapping up, and as expected it’s pointing toward there being a new BoC album out soon, which probably has their small but scarily fervent cult of fans twitching with delight right now. In other news, it is a new week with a new schedule of live music just waiting to be dipped into....

So, you’ve read the Chicago Cultural Plan, right? You know, the one ordered up by Mayor Harold Washington in the 1980s? Which made Chicago an enduring icon for arts advocates and city planners nationwide and beyond? Our very own Magna Carta of urban arts? Last week, after trekking through the dismal abandoned coffee shop that’s been greeting visitors on the Randolph Street side of the Cultural Center since the end of last year, I sat in on a “cultural mapping” presentation by professor Daniel Silver of the University of Toronto....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Ah, yes. Politics,” Page wrote by way of explanation. “The four-month suspension is, in effect, the result of a little political shimmy-shammy. In return for some high profile Gorecki supporters endorsing Bob Spence, a judicial candidate favored by Thomas, he agreed to the four-month suspension.” Thomas sued for defamation. He said that that “shimmy-shammy,” if true, was the kind of thing that would have gotten him indicted for official misconduct....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » [In all seriousness: it really is frustrating to see Obama’s name bandied about on the issue without mentioning McCain’s utterly mendacious abuse of public financing, which he used as collateral to secure a loan and then tried to get out of it. In other words, if his campaign failed, he was going to use matching funds to pay his debts....

Courtesy Duran European Sandwiches Cafe Now open I’ve been spending way too much time lately waiting at cold el platforms and desolate bus stops. It can put a person in a bad mood. CTA president Forrest Claypool has said that he takes public transportation “occasionally, when it fits his schedule.” News flash, Mr. Claypool: transit that inspires the likes of @CTAFails fits no one’s schedule. Most of us just have to wait....

Beginning January 15, the West Town Tavern is offering a $16.95 Monday night fried chicken special. On the plate: garlic mashed potatoes, sauteed Swiss chard, buttermilk biscuits in wild mushroom gravy, and half an organic, breaded, buttermilk-marinated bird (fried in trans-fat free canola oil, of course). Two months down the road, on March 11, chef Susan Goss and co. will celebrate this addition to the Monday night lineup with a special Sunday-night chicken dinner featuring guest of honor John T....

Who Wants to Buy the Bloomingdale Trail? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I was wondering if at all possible, as the city seems to fuck things up constantly, if through Kickstarter or whatever that is that the people not the city could possibly purchase and maintain this trail? This way the people, not the city would own it. It would seem that with the drive and enthusiasm that many have regarding this trail it could possibly happen much quicker and in a way that the people involved would have it done in a fashion more to what they actually are looking for in a use that suits their needs....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The precipice here is the second deck of the Periferico, a ribbonlike freeway slashing across the Mexican metropolis, with miles of new caissons and castings and enormous concrete trusses that everyone involved with the project considers the devil’s own handiwork, its success necessarily hinging, according to on-site superstition, on the grisly extinction of lives. Quid pro quo, a savage deity worthy of Mel Gibson, rewarding faithful observance with yet another sacrificial death....

Every critic who steps off the elevators on the Trump Tower’s 16th floor is going to have the pin already pulled from his grenade, braced for any hint of the Donald’s trademark vulgarity. At least I know I did. But though the prohibitive prices and cheesy tunes piped through the sound system raised my hackles, the food at Sixteen is bewitching. It certainly confirms the reputation of chef Frank Brunacci, who launched his globe-trotting career in Melbourne, Australia, and went on to London’s Les Saveurs and Ritz-Carlton restaurants in Atlanta and New Orleans....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As much as the union and elected officials love to talk about putting more police on the street, training and deployment strategies typically have a far greater impact on law enforcement than a handful of extra cops. And Donahue says that when the field training program is working right, the training officers can show inexperienced police how to work with the community—a key to improving relations as well as reducing crime....

WLUW’s Weird Kids Night with DJ sets by the Cool Kids, Jake Austen, and others INFO 773-276-1411 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Chicago sound hasn’t reached a lot of people, but it’s reached the right people. Local acts have thoroughly exploited hip-hop’s embrace of MySpace over the past year or so, using the Web to market themselves to a nontraditional hip-hop crowd and get noticed by bloggers with genre-straddling audiences....

“A pirate band,” the cooks at Schwa once called themselves, summing up the romantic view of the rebelliously creative storefront kitchen as one of the last holdouts against modern corporatized life. At the other end of the spectrum, in the halls of a hotel kitchen, the atmosphere is less buccaneer than cruise liner. There may be the star chef at the helm, but behind him or her there’s a large crew pumping out French toast and club sandwiches on carts that roll morning, noon, and night....

The Rhinoceros Theater Festival is 24 years old now, which means it should be totally immersed in social media, internships, and postromantic hookups a la Girls. Instead this brainchild of the Curious Theatre Branch is still putting on small-scale, low-budget, original, live works—31 of them this time around—by members of the Chicago’s apparently burgeoning fringe. The Carter Family Family Show Country music’s pioneering Carter Family is the subject of this interesting but slight offering from the Neo-Futurists....

Thursday12 Toumani Diabate & the Chicago Transilience EnsembleDJ Jazzy JeffJamey JohnsonLast False HopeMetal Rouge Friday13 Annie Get Your GunBorisCrystal CastlesRufus WainwrightWitchbanger Saturday14 Annie Get Your GunLast False HopeLower Dens Sunday15 Annie Get Your Gun Tuesday17 Ty Segall Wednesday18 Grant Park Orchestra DJ JAZZY JEFF To the general public DJ Jazzy Jeff will always just be the dude who costarred with Will Smith in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and the video to “Parents Just Don’t Understand....

Friday, 1 PM, Indiana Harbor, East Chicago, Indiana: The Mittal steelworks sits at the bottom of the southern curve of Lake Michigan. In its industrial heyday, this strip, stretching from South Chicago to Gary, was part of the Ruhr of America. All night, the sky glowed like a bonfire; all day, the air glittered like mica. Today Mittal is the biggest steelmaking complex on the continent. It’s a steaming, rusting city, miles long and miles deep....

Seth Magle, director of Lincoln Park Zoo’s Urban Wildlife Institute is buzzing about: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » City Critters: Wildlife in the Urban Jungle I recently read an advance copy of City Critters and was very impressed with how well it balanced in-depth information about urban wildlife with a conversational tone and relevant examples from most major U.S. cities, including Chicago. The book manages to be unique without being overly sensational and is replete with factoids—I learned some new tidbits, and I have a PhD in this field!...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Tribune put Rick Popely’s story on page one last Friday morning, then called him in and fired him later in the day. Which means, he reflects at tellzell.com, “I’ll have another memorable story about life at the Tribune.” Tell Zell is an LA-based site that invites posters to tell the Tribune Company boss “what you really think.” Look for the petition telling Zell that since he’s laying them off by the hundreds, his employees (Zells likes to call them his “partners”) deserve a representative on the board of directors (with another to represent the LA community)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » District officials say they’re changing some of the procedures for public meetings in response to the deadly shooting at a City Council meeting in Missouri in February. Members of the public who want to sit in on the board’s discussions of things like engineering contracts and real estate transactions already have to sign in, present a picture ID, pass through a metal detector, and submit any bags to a search by district police....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last Tuesday the downbeat sci-fi thriller Blindness was released on DVD, and I was startled to learn that on the movie-review site Metacritic I was listed as giving the film a zero score. For those of you unfamilar with Metacritic, it collates reviews of a single movie from various U.S. publications and converts their star ratings to a scale of 0 to 100, which allows the site to supply consumers with an aggregate score (some critics are weighted over others, though the site won’t name names)....