The idea was as improbable as the cloverleaf-shaped building. How could preservationists stand in the way of Northwestern University’s plan to raze Bertrand Goldberg’s architecturally unique Prentice Women’s Hospital and replace it with a new medical research center—the linchpin of a promised billion-dollar investment in the neighborhood? But then, for a while, that flimsiest of pipe dreams seemed possible. Christina Morris of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Bonnie McDonald of the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois, Jonathan Fine of Preservation Chicago, and the members of their organizations waged a campaign that heightened public awareness of the city’s vulnerable cache of 20th-century architecture and immortalized the image of Prentice, with its concrete towers that seem to float in space....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Before I get to the usual recommendations from our Soundboard page, I’d like to remind you about a few shows mentioned elsewhere. The Logan Launch Festival, which celebrates the opening of the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago, runs Fri 10/12-Sun 10/14. The Spektral Quartet—whose new residency at the U. of C....

The line on Django Unchained, the latest from Quentin Tarantino, is that it’s a companion piece to his previous feature, Inglourious Basterds. Both are genre pieces that function as racial revenge fantasies: the war movie Inglourious Basterds shows Jewish-American soldiers slaughtering Nazis in occupied France, and the western Django Unchained follows a freed slave in the antebellum south as he guns down hillbillies, plantation owners, and Klansmen. Both movies play fast and loose with history: Inglourious Basterds ends with Hitler being assassinated, and Django Unchained, set in 1858, is filled with implausible characters and events....

Update: Hung jury on all but the most boring count, which is making a false statement to the FBI about not tracking or caring who gives him the money, according to WBEZ; 23 counts remain in hands of an apparently ambivalent God. Former prosecutor Patrick Deady is really interesting, worth tuning in. MOAR BLAGO!!! Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ladies and gentlemen, what Rod Blagojevich is guilty of, via WBEZ’s guide to the charges:...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Fuller is by no means a well-known writer now, but he’s survived, at least, mostly on the reputation of The Cliff-Dwellers, a so-so realist satire about life in a Chicago skyscraper. It’s deservedly considered a minor work of the era–as Michael Miner wrote in 1994, “to know anything about it is to stand guilty of effete intellectual snobbery.”...

But the blame game hasn’t been working that well around here lately. Some aldermen, tired of being attacked by voters for slow snow removal, spikes in crime, and the parking meter fiasco, have been griping that a lack of planning and transparency by the administration has made Chicago’s financial problems even worse than they would have been. As an example they cite the administration’s poorly conceived plan to put a tax on Dumpsters....

Paul Kelvington, who founded Minutemen tribute band Econoline in 2010, has rounded up buddies Kevin J. Frank (Haymarket Riot), Adam Reach (Poison Arrows), and Jay Ryan (Dianogah) to perform as the Fugazi tribute Instrument. Though this Wolf could joke that most of Frank’s bands have sounded like Fugazi tributes, this time it’s for a good cause. On Sun 6/3 at Lincoln Hall the four-piece will perform 13 Songs and donate the proceeds to help Girls Rock!...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Lebrecht, in his handy and engaging resource The Life and Death of Classical Music, argues that Kurt Sanderling, a friend of the composer, was his greatest interpreter: “Facing American orchestras, who knew nothing of the deprivation of Soviet life, he would patiently explain how a tuba wickedly portrays a party apparatchik on his first junket abroad, or a piccolo ironically punctures the arrogance of power” (p....

Dividing Logan Square This festival should cater to a wide range of residents in the CITY OF CHICAGO not only the Logan Square community. It’s about the art and making the venue fun for everyone and ANYONE that comes out. The reality is that Logan and the surrounding areas have an overwhelming majority of folks (LATINO INCLUDED and HIGHLY represented) that appreciate all of the music in the line-up for all three days....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This weekend I noticed a fellow guest at a cookout wearing what looked like a simplified version of an espadrille, the rope-soled fabric shoe that has its origins in Catalonia. It featured the traditional fabric upper and squarish toe, but the stitching and unusual patterned material were new. She’d picked them up at Akira, she told me, and they were called TOMS Shoes....

Stefanie Wright Best of both worlds: bourbon (barrel aged) beer. “In the 70s and early 80s, Wrigleyville was a shithole. As much of a shithole as anywhere else, anyway,” my companion told me as we headed out to Sweet Baby Ray’s Smokehouse, the new city outpost of the suburban chain. We’d picked a rainy weekday night when the Cubs were on the road, and we were off to an auspicious beginning, with ample parking and a dearth of drunken dudes....

Dance is a family affair for Starinah “Star” Dixon. Her mother, two brothers, and multiple cousins are all practitioners. How’d that happen? “My grandma put my brothers and all my older cousins in class when they were young.” They did “all kinds of dance” at the Better Boys Foundation in North Lawndale, where Dixon grew up. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Pretty much when I started walking, Bril was like, ‘Do this shuffle,’” Dixon says....

The monkeypox vaccine and a change to this column Nonmonogamous dads, swapping holes, and more answers to your burning questions On slamming headaches and “left behind” sperm cells Some who have submissive desires and traumatic sexual histories find BDSM therapeutic. Some guys just see me as their gay Black fantasy come to life. She might just be annoyed. An untouchable butt, NPR during sex, and more quickies A relationship defined by sketchy behavior, gaslighting, and snooping...

Q I’m a man who recently started seeing a wonderful woman. Like me, she’s divorced. While my ex-wife left me for another man, my girlfriend’s ex-husband was controlling and abusive. Our relationship is the opposite—emotionally, psychologically, and sexually. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A If your girlfriend’s ex-husband had manipulated or bullied her into vaginal intercourse—if he had repeatedly and brutally raped her vaginally during their terrible, awful, no good, very bad marriage—would you feel guilty about an interest in consensual, vanilla, missionary, penis-in-vagina intercourse?...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In Illinois, to regain a certifiably clean record and collect compensation — a lump payment of $60,150 for five years or less in prison, or $120,300 for six to 14 years — an exonerated inmate must obtain a “pardon based on innocence” from the governor. A 15-member state review board interviews the petitioners and makes a recommendation, but the governor is not obligated to make a decision....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last week I posted the unfortunate news that fascinating Congolese street band Staff Benda Bilili would be touring the U.S. in October but not making a stop in Chicago, despite the fact that a scuttled stateside tour in 2011 hinged on an anchor date in Millennium Park made possible by Mike Orlove and Brian Keigher. Both of those top-notch music programmers were laid off by the city at the end of last year, and I’ve had a bad feeling ever since about what their absence might mean for this year’s World Music Festival....

Deborah Maris Lader, director of Chicago Printmakers Collaborative experiences the unfamiliar with: Behind the Beautiful Forevers I’m shipping off to northern India soon, so I’ve been immersed in educating myself about the region. Katherine Boo’s book, about the people who live in the slums abutting the Mumbai airport, is so well written and thoughtful about its characters that it reads like fiction, when in fact it’s a work of narrative nonfiction....

The Sky looks brighter this season. Chicago’s franchise in the WNBA converted last year’s inaugural 5-29 record into three top-20 college draft picks, and it’s hired a coach who’s clearly more engaged than the old one. The combination of new talent and new tactics has turned the Sky into a bona fide basketball team. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Candice Dupree, the team’s top draft pick last season, remains its best player....

Blake Edwards, aka Vertonen, and fellow Chicago sound artist Mykel Boyd will collaborate between solo sets at this afternoon show–and by proxy both will collaborate with sculptor Juan Angel Chavez, who built the installation they’ll be playing in. His Speaker Project opened at the Hyde Park Arts Center in late April and has been hosting performances since May. Set inside a hangarlike space that’s open to the street during shows, it’s like a junkyard temple made from scrap wood, metal, glass bottles, PVC pipe, traffic cones, and two giant resonating horns....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Though Swedish producer Phat Deuce released “Bubble Di System” in May via Diplo-related free-music online label Jeffree’s—right after I’d finished writing an article about the label—I didn’t download it, mostly because, seriously, if there’s a producer’s alias that makes hippie jam bands seem like Nobel-worthy geniuses at coming up with cool names, it’s “Phat Deuce.” But during a recent trip down the Soundcloud rabbit hole, I ran across it again and gave it a try, and now I get why Diplo would dig this....