Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » • Your dining agenda for the next few months may be set in this epic south-side taco survey by Titus Ruscitti at Serious Eats Chicago. It makes you realize how vast and undiscovered the Mexican food scene in this town remains—even as an assiduous explorer of south-side taquerias, I felt like Sandra Bullock staring into the 3-D void of space when confronted with the galaxy of places I’ve never heard of, or have actually been to without ordering what is apparently the thing to have (the pastor at Don Cuco on 47th was pretty lame—who would have guessed that the shrimp taco there would turn out to be glorious?...

Dan Rosenthal was vacationing on Saint Barth’s last year when a dead loggerhead sea turtle washed up on the beach. The loggerhead is a threatened species, and when the local paper reported that this one had swallowed a plastic bag, Rosenthal had a crisis of conscience. His Loop-based casual-Italian minichain Sopraffina Marketcaffe went through 400,000 nonbiodegradable petroleum-based plastic bags a year. And his 89-year-old mother was a sea turtle activist on Longboat Key, Florida....

On Sunday Lady Gaga hit Pitchfork for the second year running, this time to see M.I.A., but she escaped Gossip Wolf’s keen eye. On Saturday we saw Devon Welsh and Matthew Otto of Majical Cloudz taking a stroll, as well as Disappears’ Brian Case and White/Light’s Matthew Hale Clark watching Metz; Sky Ferreira listened to Swans for maybe ten seconds before fleeing. On Sunday members of Treated Crew hung out in the VIP area after jumping onstage with DJ Rashad; Sally Timms, Damons Locks, and Major Taylor caught Killer Mike and El-P; former Das Racist MC Kool A....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Polish Museum of America hosts a dinner to celebrate Wigilia, the Polish Christmas Eve. Dishes include oplatek, an unleavened Christmas wafer, and traditional meatless dishes like mushroom soup, fried fish and pickled herring, dried fruit compote, pierogi, pastries, nuts, and candies. There’ll also be a presentation on other Polish Christmas customs, a re-creation of a traditional Polish cottage decorated for the holidays, and activities including ornament making and caroling....

Amy Braswell JP Marquez and Raul Rico in Home/Land You may recall Home/Land, the Albany Park Theater Project production that opened in January of 2012. Not to be confused with the TV series, Home/Land was an exploration of the lives of undocumented immigrants written and performed by the project’s teenage participants. The result was so accomplished, Reader reviewer Asher Klein wrote that “Given the contrapuntal plotlines and adroit scene-building ....

Aaron Dilloway, Modern Jester Enemy, the invaluable experimental music venue run by Jason Soliday, closed its doors in July, but it didn’t take too long for a new operation to pop in the same space. The multiarts venue Tritriangle quietly opened up last October, but although its schedule has been sparse thus far—it held one of the concerts presented as part of December’s Gli.tc/h fest—it holds great promise, some of which arrives Saturday....

The Chef: Dave Beran (Next)The Challenger: Matthias Merges (Yusho)The Ingredient: Cashew apples Beran wasn’t able to locate fresh cashew apples—for one thing, they’re not in season, and even if they were, they’re too delicate to ship—but with the help of a friend who’s a movie producer in LA, he did track down frozen ones. The friend sent some interns out to search for the pseudofruit, Beran said, and “one of them found them in the back freezer section of a little Mexican market in LA....

It’s been six years since Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa and I published Abbas Kiarostami (University of Illinois Press), about Iran’s most famous and most controversial filmmaker. The book combined the perspectives of myself, an American film critic with a Jewish background, and Mehrnaz, an Iranian-American filmmaker and teacher with an Islamic background, on Kiarostami’s films, which are neither narrative features nor documentaries but something in between. Where Is the Friend’s House? (1986), Close-Up (1990), Life and Nothing More ....

In May 2004, Mitsuko Uchida sat at a piano in front of a chamber-size version of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and with dancing arms and generous facial expressions elicited refined, superbly balanced, and utterly captivating readings of Mozart’s 13th and 19th concerti. Now this sensitive and intelligent musician returns for a program that includes Bach’s glorious Brandenburg Concerto no. 5, also featuring CSO principal flutist Mathieu Dufour (who stole the show in a performance of the work at Ravinia last summer) and concertmaster Robert Chen....

Reader contributor Ignatiy Vishnevetsky weighs in on the latest Saw movie: “Strange, dumb, and sometimes even fun, the seventh and last installment in Lionsgate’s torture-porn franchise would have been just as dull and pretentious as its six predecessors if it had been competent, but its deficiencies make it the series’ most enjoyable entry. A self-help phony, a cop-turned-serial-killer, an internal affairs officer, and the wife of a different serial killer all figure in the convoluted plot, but the movie has so little sense of space, time, pacing, or characterization that they might as well be anonymous people; in its Grand Guignol gauntlet of flashbacks and 3D dismemberments, who’s doing what to whom, or why, doesn’t really matter....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If you ever find yourself in a dark alley beset by ruffians and forced to defend your opinions on the origins of say, chicken Vesuvio, you want Anthony Buccini by your side. The sociolinguist and culinary historian is a rigorous, sometimes pugnacious scholar and a culinary traditionalist whose work has been recognized at the highest levels of academe. His paper “Western Mediterranean Vegetable Stews and the Integration of Culinary Exotica” won the prestigious Sophie Coe Prize in Food History at the 2005 Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery, and the talk he gave on it last December at the Chicago Historical Society revealed how the humblest foods (pisto, cianfotta, ratatouille) have a complicated, interconnected history....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Thanks to the planet’s insatiable appetite for sushi, the global supply of bluefin tuna has been depleted by as much as 80 percent since the 1950s. The bluefin is an apex predator—that is, a predator that as an adult has no natural predators in its ecosystem—so when it’s gone, the fish it eats will decimate the species they eat until the oceans are empty of everything but invertebrates....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 50th Ward alderman Bernard Stone, who is Jewish, has recently been suggesting that his opponents are making anti-Semitic remarks when they accuse him of helping his “friends” with zoning changes. Over the weekend he reported that someone sent him a copy of one of his mailings with a swastika scribbled over his picture. Naisy Dolar, one of Stone’s challengers, said the race is shifting her way and announced plans for a celebration party....

For 20 months Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. had been swimming beneath the surface of a distant lake, trying to escape the stink of the Blagojevich mess even though he hasn’t been charged with any crime. But Senate Candidate 5 longs to become Mayoral Candidate 1, and so last Friday he finally poked his head out of the water, appearing as a guest on WLS AM’s Don Wade & Roma talk show....

“It was for everybody, not just me, the crime of the century,” declares former New York mayor Ed Koch in The Central Park Five. The crime Koch refers to was the brutal rape of Trisha Meili, a young, white investment banker jogging through Central Park in April 1989, but the movie, which opens Friday at Music Box, alleges another sort of crime, one that’s extended well past the century. Five teenagers—four black, one Hispanic—were convicted of the rape and served five to seven years in prison, but in 2002 a convicted serial rapist named Matias Reyes came forward and confessed and DNA evidence confirmed his story, exonerating all five men....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last night the folks at Northwest Chicago Film Society proudly asserted that they were projecting Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park in its correct aspect ratio of 1.37:1 for the first time in Chicago. I hadn’t seen the film since it played at the Landmark Century in 2008, where it was projected in the less boxy—and far more common—ratio of 1....

Intrepidos Punks Tomorrow nightA week from tomorrow the Logan Theatre launches a new late-night series called Wednesday Rewind. The series, slated to occur weekly at 10:30 PM, will be devoted to weird or otherwise obscure items from the 70s and 80s. As you might expect, the selections skew towards exploitation movies—tomorrow’s inaugural screening is a mid-80s Mexican Mad Max knockoff called Intrepidos Punks—though the grab bag program also includes Fabio: A Time for Romance, Baby Huey’s Easter Adventure, and the semirespectable Liquid Sky....

SHINE A LIGHT ssDirected by Martin Scorsese Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For a certain white-male demographic, Shine a Light is a match made in heaven—who better to toughen up the Stones than Scorsese, who’s used their songs in Mean Streets, Goodfellas, Casino, and The Departed? For this project he wisely talked the band into staging an intimate, New York-themed show instead of the gigantic open-air concert in Rio de Janeiro that Mick Jagger wanted him to film....

If you want to know how to make 1,800 hotel units magically disapper, I urge you to study the mysterious case of the Wolf Point Development, the three-tower project planned along the Chicago River near Kinzie. Why couldn’t I have been that smart? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On May 29, the developers unveiled their project at a meeting hosted by 42nd Ward alderman Brendan Reilly....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the wake of Barack Obama’s victory in the Iowa caucuses, the Gene Siskel Film Center has canceled its two scheduled screenings of Bob Hercules and Keith Walker’s 53-minute video Senator Obama Goes to Africa, part of this month’s “Stranger Than Fiction” documentary series. Barbara Scharres, director of programming, says she thought the movie was a natural for the series when she chose it last year; back then Obama was still a long shot for the Democratic nomination and the movie was new work by a local filmmaker of note (Hercules codirected the highly regarded Forgiving Dr....