Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You may have no idea what the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago does (it treats and releases the wastewater produced in most of Cook County) or why it’s important to the environment (because otherwise we’d have a whole lot of untreated sewage in our waterways). Regardless, if you live around here, you’re helping pay for its nine commissioners to cruise around in gas-guzzling SUVs and Crown Vics wherever they want, whenever they want....

The RedEye Guy The kiosk has long since closed. Nobody reads the Sun-Times anymore, I muttered aloud. (This week, Sun-Times management began talks with the Newspaper Guild over the desperate paper’s plan to cut 35 guild jobs.) The RedEye man disagreed. “A few people read it,” he said. “Every day I see seven or eight come in.” Sure enough, just then someone entered the station carrying the Bright One. “That’s one of the eight,” he said....

Last year the school advocacy group Parents United for Responsible Education threw a party celebrating its 20th year of “parental advocacy and action.” Earlier this month it sent out a fund-raising letter breaking some bad news: PURE’s at the end of its rope. They form coalitions with other outsiders and advise aggrieved teachers and parents about the ins and the outs of our clout-heavy school system. They’re not afraid to file lawsuits—as a matter of fact PURE’s got one challenging the Board of Education’s stance on local school councils in charter and privately run schools right now....

friday5 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Today and tomorrow, the Good Eating stage at the Printers Row Lit Fest features cooking demos and talks from the likes of former Top Chef contestant Radhika Desai, mixologist Bridget Albert, chef Gale Gand (Brunch), and trib reporter Mark Caro (The Foie Gras Wars). Schedule here (PDF). Sat-Sun 10 AM-6 PM, Dearborn between Congress and Polk, free....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “A century before I was born in a large Southern city which shall be nameless, my mother’s family left Murfreesboro, Tennessee, where until the Civil War they raised cotton. Their house and everything in it had been garrisoned by Union soldiers before the war’s end, so when the family left, they left with nothing, and I was almost grown-up before I understood that that was as it should have been....

The first officially grown-up thing I ever did was go to a Laurie Anderson concert by myself. This was in Vermont in 1984, and Anderson was touring behind her second album, Mister Heartbreak. I was 14. I’d been saving up pocket change, and I walked downtown and bought a ticket without telling anyone where I was going. I remember the sparseness of the crowd—filthy Burlington hippies, it seemed, had little use for robot art music....

festival Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The 19th annual African Festival of the Arts runs Friday through Monday in Washington Park at 51st and Cottage Grove. Presented by the Africa International House, it features music on three stages in a range of genres, among them jazz, blues, hip-hop, neosoul, gospel, and traditional African. (At press time the DJs on each stage had not been confirmed....

VAMPIRE WEEKEND CONTRA (XL) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The curious thing about Vampire Weekend is that many of the same music critics and bloggers who helped the band achieve this coup are discomfited by prominent aspects of their aesthetic. Almost every review of Contra makes this clear. The New York Times notes that Vampire Weekend’s pairing of preppy panache and Afropop dabblings “smacked of cultural tourism....

Toupee are one of Chicago’s most interesting bands, both visually and sonically, and they put on a live show you won’t soon forget. Everybody swaps instruments unrelentingly, so that Nick Hagen (guitar, some bass), Mark Ragassi (bass, some drums), Scott Frigo (guitar, some drums), and front woman Whitney Allen (guitar, bass, or just singing) never stay in the same configuration for long. Allen cavorts about in one of several hairy monster masks, drawing on a seemingly bottomless repertoire of odd sarcastic dances, ritualistic motions, and pure freak-out moves—and when the mask comes off, the mad staring eyes under her postapocalyptic hairdon’t look like they can melt glass....

When Ronnie Higgins (Bangers & Lace, Bar DeVille) challenged Manny Sofios (Gilt Bar, Au Cheval) with natto, fermented soybeans, Sofios wasn’t sure what to expect. The Japanese foodstuff is known for its slimy texture, but it also has an arresting aroma—”I was getting yelled at about the smell,” he says. He opted to pair it with a roughly filtered sake, reasoning that “if you’re going to do something gnarly like this, you might as well fight fire with fire....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » My vote for single dumbest idea I’ve seen in films in the last year or so goes to Agnieszka Holland‘s Copying Beethoven, wherein the classical maestro’s mousy apprentice (Diane Kruger) purportedly shadow conducts (well, that’s the conceit anyway) the Vienna premiere of B.’s Choral Symphony from inside the orchestra pit, the el primo composer/conductor himself–Ed Harris at the podium, gesticulating madly like some audience reject from the old 50s TV show So You Want to Lead a Band–absorbing her every prompt since, being deaf and all, he can’t actually hear what’s going down, yo!...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After almost ten years, during which jewelry designer Erin Gallagher developed a list of retail clients, opened her own store in the West Loop, and then moved it to take advantage of the greater foot traffic in Lincoln Park, Erin Gallagher Jewelry is rebranding itself as Gem Bar, a transformation is due in part to Gallagher’s busy schedule as the mom to a toddler....

I am sure that most of you have been following the details regarding the 2016 bid through the media and I am sure that each one of you has your personal opinion. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Should we move ahead or should we discontinue our fight for the 2016 bid? Send your thoughts and comments to OlympicQuestion@33rdward.org. In other words, it’s notable that Mell is one of the many aldermen now bristling at the mayor and wondering aloud if he was wise to go along with so many of the boss’s recent initiatives....

Risk is the lifeblood of Thodos Dance Chicago’s annual “New Dances” program. Case in point: seasoned choreographer Jessica Miller Tomlinson and relative newcomer Michael McDonald joined forces for one of the eight premieres being presented by company dancers this year, to find out how her self-described “line-oriented” style would combine with what he calls his “ooey-gooey” fluidity. Turns out, they cook. Working day by day without a specific plan, Tomlinson and McDonald produced an intense, mysterious quintet called 93 83....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When Kosuke Fukudome emerged from the dugout — smiling bashfully at the media and shaking his head at the cold — before the Cubs’ home opener on Monday, the thing that distinguished him most from his teammates wasn’t that he is the first Japanese Cub. It was that he carried a white bat. After they all dropped their equipment near the batting cage and went to stretch and warm up with a game of catch, Fukudome’s white bat stood out amid all the black bats of his teammates, laid out like trout on the grass....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » With all the buzz the last few weeks about UFO sightings at O’Hare (more online hits for that particular tidbit than any other news story in recent memory, per Eric Zorn’s column in last Sunday’s Trib), it’s hard not to consider briefly where it all began, SF film-wise, in the 50s aftermath of Roswell. At the upscale end there’s inevitably The Day the Earth Stood Still, with uberalien Michael Rennie striding purposefully down his celestial ramp (or whatever those gangplank things are called) from the alien craft, with both an invitation and a warning: live peacefully among yourselves, earth mortals, or we’ll turn your planet into a cosmic cinder (sounding for all the world like a certain someone we know in Iraq ....

What’s Next for Local News? The other problem too is Web-based publishing. I can’t speak for Canada, but this remains a country where only [80 percent] of the population has Internet access at home—large swaths of the poor and/or rural community go without. Without those readers able to even passively participate, there is the question of how that exclusion will affect coverage and a news outlet’s primary mission of informing the public....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The world is getting darker, my friends, and that special time of year is upon us—there are about to be turkeys and tofu options, menorahs and Christmas trees, special issues, Eartha Kitt singing “Santa Baby” in every store you walk in to, and, of course, all of the hanging out with those strange people who look a lot like you but might not think like you at all....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » About a month ago local metal trio Oozing Wound unleashed their thrash masterpiece Retrash on Thrill Jockey, and if you’re like me, its brief 30 minutes probably left you wanting more. Luckily the band has just gifted us with exactly that: 30 more minutes of music. The Third Turd—their third release—is a cassette sequenced and compiled by bassist Kevin Cribbin that collects both practice space demos dating back to the band’s very beginning and a whole bunch of clips from Rambo movies....

Giant meteor. Alien invasion. Nukes. World economic collapse. Zombie plague. Famine. Melting of the ice caps. Rapidly mutating airborne virus. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What follows is a bunch of places that, like Monti’s, I would return to without hesitation after writing about them. To me, they’re the most important new restaurants of the year. I kept going back to Avondale’s Yusho for completely different reasons....