The Reader’s Choice: European Union Film Festival Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This seems like overkill, because we’ve been featuring the EU fest in Movies all month. But without the Chicago Documentary Festival—which postponed its 2008 festival to this spring and has now canceled it altogether­—the Gene Siskel Film Center’s annual March series of recent European releases is the city’s best bet for catching great new movies....

Between the council chamber and the restrooms I know this might be a shocker, but some aldermen are incredibly hard to reach. I’ve found that the best way to hunt them down is by showing up at the monthly meetings of the full City Council—and then waiting for them to step off the council floor for a potty break. Council meetings have been known to last up to four hours, and anyone who had a cup of coffee that morning is going to have to hit the john at some point....

Courtesy of DJ Slugo’s Facebook page DJ Slugo Yesterday electronic wunderkind Nicolas Jaar debuted “Ghetto,” an exultant eight-minute house track featuring vocals from Chicago ghetto house and juke producer Thomas Kendricks, better known as DJ Slugo. Kendricks, who cut his teeth with influential ghetto-house label Dance Mania, drew upon his experience growing up in the Robert Taylor Homes for his contribution: it’s a plainspoken, emotionally resonant spoken-word piece about watching addicts shoot up, gang wars, and neighborhood blight....

The Scotch Malt Whiskey Society When Drumbar, the rooftop bar at the top of the Gold Coast’s Raffaello Hotel, opened last summer, it didn’t make much of an impact among locals at all—much less serious drinkers. That’s probably because the hotel’s Miami-based ownership placed more of an emphasis on clubby, see-and-be-seen South Beach-style hoo-ha than bringing in regulars who could sustain such a lofty spot in the dead of winter....

Last month a Chicago band called Houses hit the charts at the Hype Machine, a massively popular online aggregator that tracks which artists and songs more than 1,500 music bloggers are posting about. Their track “Soak It Up,” an airy, infectious bit of electronic pop, reached number six on the Most Blogged Artists chart the week of September 13 and number one on the Most Favorited Music chart on September 11—a notch above Brooklyn duo Ratatat, who’d just played the Riviera....

DEAR READERS: Sophia Wallace, the NYC-based conceptual artist behind the amazing Cliteracy project, was a guest on my podcast recently. During our chat, Wallace told me that a column I wrote years ago about the importance of the clit had a big impact on her as a teenager—in fact, she still had the copy of the column that she had clipped out of the newspaper. I’m reprinting that column this week for three solid reasons: ignorance about the clit is still rampant (hence the importance of Wallace’s work), reprinting the column allows me to plug Wallace’s work (check it out at sophiawallace....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Byrne and Chapman are right. The court acknowledged what it was up to. “The issue we must resolve,” said the majority, is “whether our state Constitution prohibits the state from establishing a statutory scheme in which both opposite-sex and same-sex couples are granted the right to enter into an officially recognized family relationship that affords all of the significant legal rights and obligations traditionally associated under state law with the institution of marriage, but under which the union of an opposite-sex couple is officially designed a ‘marriage’ whereas the union of a same-sex couple is officially designated a ‘domestic partnership....

40 E. Delaware Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If the arrival of Scoop last year and the Marc Jacobs store planned for Bucktown don’t prove that major retailers and designers are finally taking Chicago seriously, the opening of not one but two Intermix locations this spring should do the trick. The New York-based chain carries garments from both the high and low ends of the fashion spectrum, organizing them not by brand but by what goes with what (the blousy tops are with the skinny jeans, for instance)....

Alexie’s Achievement Highland Park The Trouble With TIFs Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When the state permitted sucking money from one [TIF] district to be used outside its boundaries, they did two things helping corruption. First, they controlled the alderman, stopped him from complaining on fear of losing TIF money to another ward, and its mirror, not to gain from the revenue from the adjacent TIF....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » My top 40 films from 1990 (an arbitrary beginning, just to keep things manageable) through this year, again without commentary … though yes, I’m aware of the discrepancy between this list and the last one: why put Wild at Heart ahead of Pulp Fiction if the Tarantino’s in your all-time top ten and Lynch’s film isn’t? One of the mysteries of context, I guess, since a priori I wouldn’t put Pulp at the absolute head of any list of faves, much as I do value it, and there are plenty of personal/formal reasons for my treating Wild as a cause celebre (a millennial appreciation I wrote for Cinema Scope magazine being first among them)....

As you might have seen in the papers, the Intercontinental Exchange, based in Atlanta, recently purchased the New York Stock Exchange. Oh my god, to hear Mayor Daley fume and fret you’d have thought that the Cubs and White Sox together were about to move to Tennessee. In other words, take the CME offer and your newly formed company gets the TIF money. Take ICE’s offer and you don’t. Eventually, CME turned down the $15 million....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve heard a lot of this kind of thing over the last few months, and it seems to have intensified here in Chicago since Barack Obama took a lead in the polls. The argument basically says that Obama hasn’t spoken out strongly enough against Mayor Daley and the system of insider trading and back-room deal making this city specializes in–and then suggests that this reveals Obama’s true colors as a weak-kneed amateur, if not an outright fraud....

When Mike Perry and Austin Keultjes, aka Supreme Cuts, show up to talk to me at Joy Yee in Chinatown, they’re visibly exhausted from spending the day moving into a new practice space just north of Pilsen. They haven’t eaten since they woke up, and when our meal arrives the interview is derailed temporarily as Perry and Keultjes concentrate intensely on wolfing down a staggering amount of Chinese food. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Three days before Thanksgiving, I received a press release from Northwestern University proclaiming a great day in the school’s history: “Mayor Rahm Emanuel to speak on campus.” That’s a very impressive-sounding claim until you realize that there’s no substantive link between anything the mayor does and these jobs, other than his habit of taking credit for them. Mayor Emanuel might as well send out a press release saying that the sun has risen in the east every day since he took office—an equally accurate though irrelevant correlation....

I’d drive a long way for a good piece of fried chicken. One day in August many years ago, my wife, our daughters, and I were heading off for our annual vacation in Michigan. The plan was to hit the road “early”—no later than noon—so we could make the 8 PM closing time at Old Hamlin, a restaurant in Ludington, Michigan, that makes a pretty good fried chicken. Point is, the whole family was snarling like bears as we hit the road....

The full autobiographical letter that Robert Ryan wrote to his children can be found here; for more on Ryan’s filmography and an appreciation of his work, see “The Essential Robert Ryan.” “I think he had a lot of demons,” says Walker (formerly Tim) Ryan, a musician and teacher in Eugene, Oregon, and the eldest of the three children. “He certainly talked about his depressions as he got older. And he came from a generation where, if you were a man, you just stuffed all that stuff....

In late January 2009, Caterpillar, Peoria’s largest employer, announced it was laying off some 20,000 workers worldwide. That should have been awful timing for Josh Adams, who just a month earlier had opened June, the most ambitious restaurant the city’s ever seen. But Adams—who combines the rigorous local sourcing of Chicago farm-to-table fine-dining temples such as Vie and North Pond with a touch of the advanced techniques most of the world refers to as molecular gastronomy—was booking his 52-seat space weeks in advance, and diners were waiting knee-deep at the bar every night....

Planning to see The Jungle Book at the Goodman Theatre? There are a couple of obvious ways to make this visually dazzling production an even richer experience. If it’s been a while since you’ve seen it, you could take another look at the Disney movie, a wittier-than-you-might-remember musical tour de force, and the most direct source for this new show, which was written and directed by Mary Zimmerman. If you do, savor it: word came out this week that Disney’s hired a scriptwriter for (cringe) an upcoming live-action version of the film....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Under June Pyskacek’s direction, Kingston Mines was known primarily for its avant-garde fare, reflecting the counterculture of the late 1960s and early ’70s. In addition to its own productions–including Jean-Claude van Itallie’s The Serpent–it hosted the gender-bending Godzilla Rainbow Troupe in shows like Whores of Babylon and the Free Theater in the rock opera Aesop’s Fables. But Grease, which affectionately spoofed the teen culture of the late 1950s, was determinedly retro....

In Hot Dog, culinary historian Bruce Kraig posits that the classic Chicago-style dog is a reflection of the city’s early-20th-century demographics, incorporating the tomatoes of Mediterranean Italians and Greeks as well as the mustard and pickles of German and Jewish immigrants. And Bob Schwartz, in Never Put Ketchup on a Hot Dog, suggests that the Louisiana sport peppers and celery salt are the contributions of African-Americans who came north during the Great Migration....