The 1983 and 1987 campaigns of Harold Washington, Chicago’s first African-American mayor, paved the way for Barack Obama’s political rise by fostering a strong connection among predominantly African-American south siders and the predominantly white north side progressive community. So those of us who supported Washington and now Obama find a possible good omen in today’s news that Washington’s arch-nemesis, former alderman and onetime Republican mayoral candidate “Fast Eddie” Vrdolyak, has pleaded guilty to mail fraud in a federal racketeering case....

All stores participating in Record Store Day will stock a selection of special RSD releases, but in most cases retailers won’t know until the last minute precisely what they’ll get. So these listings don’t attempt to address that question—they’re more about special events, in-store performances, discounts, promotions, and giveaways. Last-minute changes are always possible, so check with the store if you want to be 100 percent sure. Dave’s Records Half off all used 12-inch and seven-inch singles, 78s for one dollar, free Molly’s cupcakes and candy until they run out....

Last week a cyclist was doored and knocked under a bus; according to a comment, the victim is expected to survive. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I don’t get reflexively angry about people who door bicyclists in the way that I do with those culpable for other traffic accidents. I didn’t regularly drive in a city with a substantial bicycling population until I was in my mid-20s, which meant that my driving (and parking) habits were already ingrained by the time I got here....

Dance for Life Exhibition: Photography by Sandro INFO 312-640-0730 One of Chicago’s top commercial photographers, Miller has also begun to develop a reputation in recent years as a serious artist. This past year Catherine Edelman handpicked ten of his photos for the Chicago Project, an online gallery she created to introduce local photographers to a wider audience, and this week he’ll have his first solo gallery show in Chicago. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

In early 1999, Apple was still four years from launching the iTunes store. But Chicago musician Justin Sinkovich and his partners, programmers Aaron Newton and Scott Bilby, were already envisioning an online record shop based around the MP3 format, with a well-curated selection of indie-leaning music—sort of like a digital Reckless. They’d even lined up a venture capitalist, Nat Goldhaber, a pioneer of cross-platform file sharing who’d founded an Internet marketing and payment system called Cybergold, which allowed advertisers to reward consumer attention with coupons for goods and services....

Half Acre halfacrebeer.com Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Following in the footsteps of boxed wine, which has only recently started to shake off the stigma that cheaper brands like Franzia have given it, canned beer is moving beyond Old Style and Bud Light. Craft brewers have recently started to embrace aluminum cans, which are lighter and cheaper to ship than glass bottles; unlike glass, they don’t let in light, which can make beer go skunky, and cans allow less oxygen uptake during packaging....

When Elliot Dicks, 44, moved to Chicago from Columbus in 1989, he was already a touring soundman. He’s been doing sound in local venues since installing his gear at Czar Bar in 1991; a couple years later he moved to the Fireside Bowl, and in 2002 he set up shop at the Empty Bottle, where he remains to this day. He’s incorporated as Elliotsound, but he doesn’t have a Web presence—he’s more of a word-of-mouth guy, and relies for his crew on any of a dozen or so local sound people, among them Che Arthur, Steve Moore, and Gary Schepers....

Dental Society Midwinter Meeting Chicago Dramatists Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The 80-minute one-act is presented almost entirely in flashback. Three men and three women play multiple roles, reenacting the title meeting—held at a Marriott in Skokie one frigid January—as they narrate it story-theater style. Midwestern dentists have gathered to gain new insights into the art, craft, and science of their profession—and to take a deductible vacation away from their spouses and kids....

Suzanne Malec-McKenna, the commissioner for the Chicago Department of Environment, emphasizes that the plan is meant to spur serious discussion and is by no means final. “It’s a model that’s been floated as a possibility,” she says. “I think it’ll end up being a hybrid of a range of models that have worked before it’s done.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Not surprisingly, the National Solid Wastes Management Association says that’s simply not true....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s 9am and the work rush is winding down at the polls. The polling places are a trip. The election judges worrying about whether there’s enough decaf or donuts. Some of the places are schools and then you have the principals freaking out about their teachers’ parking spaces. I witnessed one amusing sign dispute at a polling place that’s split between the 2nd and 25th Wards....

Leor Galil, Reader music critic, is obsessed with . . . Plant Parenthood, self-titled EP (self-released) A twentysomething Tennessean with a lot of feelings records five screechy, lo-fi garage tunes—and the woman playing drums is the same one who’s at the center of all his lyrics. The tension and pain of unrequited love spills into the songs, which more than makes up for the iffy quality of the recordings. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Few musical traditions are more peculiar and compelling than the katajjaq throat singing of the Inuit, a 25,000-strong native population concentrated in Canada’s Nunavut territory. It’s as much a game as a form of music: pairs of women face and embrace one another, unleashing a wild torrent of grunts, exhalations, inhalations, and all manner of guttural, rumbling low-end noises....

Over the years Mayor Daley has proven to be a master at blaming the city’s budget woes on someone or something other than himself. Usually it’s the federal or state government, but this time around he has an even bigger bogeyman to blame: it’s the economy, stupid. And what does he intend to do about it? Apparently he’s hoping to spend his way out of the doldrums, via the Olympics. “The way out of a recession is infrastructure spending,” he said....

The Hyde Park and Kenwood Issue W. Stratford Place Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » No one mentioned that he opened the original Medici Coffee House & Gallery —which quite probably had the first genuine espresso machine in Chicago outside of private Italian “social clubs”—in Hyde Park in 1958 and sold it to Hans Morsbach (for change), a young German emigrant, then a newly-minted U....

Vicente Serrano remembers sitting under a tree as a kid in Navojoa, Mexico, listening to his grandmother’s tales of her childhood in Los Angeles. “Most of her stories ended in tears,” he says. Serrano’s grandmother, Concepción “Concha” Covarrubias, was born in LA in 1924. But her mother died when she was about ten, and afterward, she says, social workers came to the house and coerced her father, a U.S. citizen, into returning to Mexico....

Eivissa FDM Mexican Cuisine & Lounge Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The primary differences between FDM and its folksier Logan Square sister, Fonda del Mar, are mostly cosmetic: this sleek North Center upscale-Mexican restaurant is all blond wood and curving white lines. There’s a varied list of margaritas and cocktails, but menuwise, despite claims to contrary, there are only a few items that deviate from the mothership’s....

Book publishing is a business conducted largely by middlemen. Its language is the language of percentages, commissions, royalties, rates, cuts, fees, and takes. As the product moves along from seller to buyer, everyone–agent, publisher, distributor, wholesaler, retailer–skims, accounting for an unkind and paradoxical reality for the middleman: book publishing is largely a business of thin (and thinning) profits. But of course there are exceptions. After studying for his PhD in 19th-century American literature at the University of Chicago, Curt taught for three years in the late 1960s and early 70s at Northwestern....

Jayme Joyce Serengeti Serengeti (aka David Cohn) is one prolific dude. Just last year he teamed up with Sufjan Stevens and Son Lux to form s / s / s and release an EP called Beak & Claw; he dropped the Kenny Dennis EP, another chapter in the evolving narrative of his titular alter ego; and he made a proper solo full-length called C.A.R. Next month the Chicago-bred rapper will drop a full-length called Saal on formerly local label Graveface, which is now based in Savannah, Georgia....

Thursday15 Samantha CrainHoleOrchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou Friday16 Candy Claws Saturday17 Candy ClawsCap’n JazzE.T. HabitTom PettyTesco Vee’s Hate Police Sunday18 Cap’n JazzKenge Kenge Monday19 Konono No. 1 Tuesday20 Darren JohnstonKonono No. 1Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti Wednesday21 Good for CowsLisandro Meza HOLE Of the many roles Courtney Love has played, in rock and out of it, her most recent incarnation is her most rock ‘n’ roll yet. She’s going where no female rock star has gone before: the latter-day Jim Morrison zone....

Alan Goldsher, author of the new George R.R. Martin parody, Game of Groans, cracks up for: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One of the myriad cool things about a TJ and Dave show is that you never know who’ll show up to improvise. Tracy Letts of August: Osage County fame has been known to drop by, and the last time I checked them out, they were joined by Oscar nominee Michael Shannon....