Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Show: Forgetters “After taking a break from music for a few years after the demise of Jets to Brazil in 2003, punk bard and former Jawbreaker front man Blake Schwarzenbach apparently returned in the mood for something a bit faster and louder,” writes Jessica Hopper. “His new band, Forgetters, is a lean, rough power trio in the mold of Mission of Burma, rounded out by Caroline Paquita (ex-Bitchin’) and former Against Me!...

As part of its semicentennial, the foreign-film distributor Janus Films has struck new prints of more than 30 features, which will screen at the Music Box through Sunday, March 11. Series passes are available for $30 (five admissions) and $50 (ten admissions). Following are screenings through Thursday, January 18; for a complete schedule visit musicboxtheatre.com. RCleo From 5 to 7 Agnes Varda’s 1961 New Wave feature–recounting two hours in the life of a French pop singer (Corinne Marchand) while she waits to learn from her doctor whether she’s terminally ill–is arguably her best work, rivaled only by her Vagabond (1985) and The Gleaners and I (2000)....

According to the cosmology of Chicago-based artist Adelheid Mers, the earth and its resources constitute a “blob,” and we living things grow on (and fall out of) it like hair. Thus “Hairy Blob,” the new Mers-curated Hyde Park Art Center show, which considers how all those hairs coexist, overlap, and interlace. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The 11 participating artists were selected for their common interest in the environment, sustainability, and social justice—but the work is multifarious....

In Blewt! Productions’ talent show the fate of the human race depends on eight contestants impressing three apes from the future whose intelligence has increased to the level of, well, amateur comedians. Each week the same eight performers compete in a different category, like music or stand-up. There’s a silly backstory to this lively show, anchored by loony host (and local stand-up) Jared Logan, who convincingly behaves as though he’s missing a frontal lobe....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 10:33 AM. Open e-mail at work. There’s a message from the United Republican Fund of Illinois. “Let’s Rebuild Our Party Together and Make it a Party of Principle,” it says. “As the millions of Americans who voted for ‘change’ last November celebrate today’s inauguration of Barack Obama – we must use this event as a launching pad for the restoration of our Republican Party in Illinois....

Hold it! Let’s be clear. Technically, the mayor did not get rid of Payton’s librarian. Instead, in his latest round of school cuts, he sliced about $700,000 from Payton’s budget. Thus forcing Payton’s principal, Timothy Devine, to do the dirty work of getting rid of 19 teachers. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But back to Payton. Let’s take a moment to appreciate the sheer awesomeness of Mayor Emanuel’s audacity....

OK, hippies–sometimes the journey is the destination, but sometimes the destination really is the destination. These ten lodgings are attractions in their own right, though we’ve also included some ideas for if and when you decide to leave. –Peter Margasak This brick and limestone bed-and-breakfast was once the icehouse for a brewery, which has been converted to the StoneHouse Pottery & Gallery, where owner Charles Fach is among the artisans. Fach’s metalwork can be found in the inn’s two suites, in the bed frames, light fixtures, and doorknobs, and his ceramic tiles depicting hops and barleys pave the floor of the entryway to the gallery....

Gerber+Scarpelli Robert Polito When the Poetry Foundation hired John Barr as president nearly a decade ago, they were looking for someone who not only was a practicing poet, but would know how to handle the more than $100 million they’d recently been given by pharmaceutical heir and poetry fan Ruth Lilly. Barr filled the bill because he’d had a 30-year career as a Wall Street investment banker and entrepreneur along with his published-poet chops....

Q I’m writing to you to settle a dispute between my husband and me. We’ve been married for six years. We’re not terribly adventurous, but we’re not totally vanilla, either. However, there’s one issue that’s driving me insane: my husband constantly pesters me to have anal sex. We’ve tried it in the past, and it is not my bag. I don’t enjoy it at all. But my husband will not stop pestering me....

Movies that deal with incest are often couched in melodrama, dealing with hidden transgressions and shattered family roles. But The Unspeakable Act, which makes its Chicago premiere this week at Gene Siskel Film Center, is different. Written and directed by Dan Sallitt (a former Reader contributor), this hushed, discreet indie drama details the complicated relationship between two siblings of a tight-knit, upper-middle-class Brooklyn family. Seventeen-year-old Jackie (Tallie Medel), the bright and seemingly well-adjusted younger daughter, harbors romantic and sexual feelings for her 18-year-old brother, Matthew (Sky Hirschkron)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I think it’s quite simply the best food movie ever made,” Bourdain wrote today in an email. “The best restaurant movie ever made–the best chef movie. The tiny details are astonishing: The faded burns on the cooks’ wrists. The “personal histories” of the cooks . . . the attention paid to the food. . . . And the Anton Ego ratatouille epiphany hit me like a punch in the chest–literally breathtaking....

Noon | Claudia Cassidy Theater 6 PM | Navy Pier Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Red Baraat Indian brass-band music remains largely unknown in the West, but its furious polyphonic puffing and rollicking grooves are a staple at wedding celebrations on the subcontinent. New York percussionist Sunny Jain, the son of Punjabi immigrants, has an abiding interest in musical hybrids—his recent Taboo (Brooklyn Jazz Underground) is a thoughtful adaption of the ghazal form for jazz quartet—and he formed Red Baraat as an Indian brass band with a distinctly American flavor....

My girlfriend and I have been battling recently over a medical question: Is there benefit to urinating while you’re in the shower? I have long held as “common sense” that peeing in the shower can actually tame (if not cure) common problems like athlete’s foot and other skin fungi. My girlfriend thinks I’m just into some weird fetish. (Maybe it’s because I have better aim while “curing” my foot problems.) More than who’s right, which theory is right?...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The feature—which was suggested in outline by Mike Sula, given its name by then Reader editor Kiki Yablon (my suggestion was “Stick a Fork in It”), and worked out in practice by Julia Thiel and me—has proved to be pretty ideal in terms of being just enough game-show gimmick with occasional gross-out value to be showbiz, yet loose and realistic enough to let chefs be themselves and capture what they really do without artificial drama....

A U.S. historian, a scholar of Chekhov, and a Japanese medievalist board a Cessna bound for the skies over the Missouri Bootheel. Knowing that a series of major earthquakes befell this region, they’re looking for evidence of sand blows, the result of liquefied subterranean sand forced under intense pressure up through the earth’s surface. The Chekhovian and the medievalist, just along for the ride, don’t show up elsewhere in this story; they’re incidental, though they’re a nice detail....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I certainly didn’t. Good poetry isn’t easy. Alexander’s massive audience naturally assumed this was to be good poetry — if it wasn’t, why was it on the program? — which meant it would have to be considered with some deliberate care for its virtues to unfold. I, for one, wasn’t in the mood for that. My mind was on Obama’s speech....

Storytelling may not be the oldest profession in the world, but it’s probably the oldest unpaid gig, and might be the oldest art. It’s a method of historiography, a means of storing memory, a desire to capture an instant like a fly in amber, and then pass it hand to hand. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A snappy little label usually credited to writer-performer Ian Belknap, live lit is a hybrid form....

NIGERIA SPECIAL: MODERN HIGHLIFE, AFRO-SOUNDS& NIGERIAN BLUES 1970-6 (SOUNDWAY) CLASH MANDINGUE: MANDING DANCE MUSIC OF THE 60’S KANTE MANFILA AND SORRY BAMBA (ORIKI MUSIC) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » These guys have been into African music for their entire careers, if not their entire lives, and their knowledge of it is unimpeachable. And admittedly even top-shelf African artists have rarely enjoyed wide distribution in the West, so it’s not like those labels are just flogging material everyone’s already heard....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Since her solid win in the nasty, expensive Democratic primary for state’s attorney, career prosecutor Anita Alvarez has kept a pretty low public profile. That’s because she’s been playing it safe and smart, traveling the county to meet with party committeemen and raise money. After all, if she gets the Democratic organization behind her she’ll win handily, especially with Barack Obama at the top of the ticket....

Chicago favorites the Waco Brothers and Nashville singer-songwriter Paul Burch have traveled in the same circles for years, and both have made records for Bloodshot. Though their output is quite different—the former is loud and woolly, the latter gentle and measured—they share a deep regard for old-school country. They recently joined forces for the wild collaboration Great Chicago Fire (Bloodshot), which they’re bringing to the FitzGerald’s stage together on Thu 4/26....