Sun-Times Media Same city, different haircuts I wasn’t around the last time The Real World filmed in Chicago. In fact, I didn’t even watch that season when it was on television because I was in middle school, and my parents wouldn’t let me watch MTV. So I definitely wasn’t aware of the massive protests that took place in Wicker Park in 2001. Thank goodness for YouTube and the Reader archive; 13 years later I was able to relive the moments when people stopped being polite and started getting real....

A Chicago filmmaker received the award for best documentary at a Missouri film festival this month, but that triumph is the least interesting part of the story she came home to tell. The day before the festival was to begin, the Missouri state government, which had underwritten the festival with a grant of nearly $100,000 in federal stimulus funds, asked for its money back. State rep Denny Hoskins, a Warrensburg Republican, issued a statement taking credit for rescuing the taxpayers’ money....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “These employees of the buildings department and the zoning department are paid good salaries with excellent benefits,” Hoffman said. “Their jobs were to make sure that the building codes and the zoning ordinances were laws that protect city residents. But what they actually did with their jobs was to make sure the laws were violated. Everything was the exact opposite of the way it should be....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Once or twice a year the popular Mexican sandwich shop Cemitas Puebla—which I wrote about just last week—and the possibly even more popular barbecue spot Smoque get together and serve Smoque’s brisket on Cemitas Puebla’s distinctive crunchy roll, with Oaxacan cheese, avocado, and both barbecue sauce and chipotle sauce. Michael Gebert Frijoles charros This year Anteliz brought another dish to the party: frijoles charros, beans with hot dogs, bacon, and chiles de arbol....

There was a brief stretch some years back in which I bought five XTC records in the span of about two weeks, many of which were easy to track down in used-LP bins all over the world. The catalyst for the sudden dive into the popular British rock band’s catalog was today’s 12 O’Clock Track, “Respectable Street,” the opener from the 1980 album Black Sea. Written by guitarist and vocalist Andy Partridge, it’s stitched with a bouncy, tom-heavy rhythm complemented by a loopy bass groove from founding member Colin Moulding....

Last September DC Entertainment—the folks who own Superman, Batman, and other big-name superheroes—cleaned house, culling their old titles, adding some new ones, and launching each of the 52 comics on the refurbished roster as a fresh product, labeled issue #1. That is to say, transforming the pop-culture universe as we know it. The result was marketed as the New 52. From Salon to Rolling Stone, the Atlantic to the Chicago Reader, columnists, bloggers, and the fashion forward expressed almost uncontainable excitement....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » His colleagues seemed pretty sure that stuff all sounded good, if not altogether familiar. But as Allen went on to say that his ordinance would require a review period of 30 days before the city cut any more big privatization deals, he set off a vigorous debate about the merits of the meter deal they rubber-stamped six months ago as well as the wisest, fastest way to cover their asses for it....

The dynamic LA art-pop singer and composer Julia Holter returns to Chicago this summer to perform at the Pitchfork Music Festival, and a month later she’ll release her third album, Loud City Song (Domino). On last year’s superb Ekstasis (RVNG) she moved away from the appealingly raw, sample-rich dreamscapes of her 2011 debut album, Tragedy, for something smoother and more accessible. But obscured by her pop savvy is a deep investment in experimental music....

“The only limit to what the Chicago Symphony can do is your imagination. Without even a murmur, they will do anything. They will do whatever you wish, as long as you wish something. It’s when you don’t ask them to do something that they become restless.“ – Departing music director George Solti to Dennis Polkow, February 3. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Daley was known not only for killing anything that smacked of reform, but also for his manners as political executioner....

One day late last summer, Tom Courtney came up with the preposterous notion of running for alderman of the 27th Ward. He wasn’t the only 27th Ward candidate playing the election-law game. Alderman Walter Burnett Jr.—the four-term incumbent —was also at it. Then Courtney knocked Rowans off the ballot for owing $60 on a parking ticket. And since Nally—I mean, Courtney—couldn’t prove otherwise, Kasper—I mean Burnett—won that round. To which, Burnett counters, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha....

During the 80s and 90s, when the Wax Trax label was at the peak of its influence, Chicago was the primary American home for electronic body music, industrial dance, and other brutalist European electronic styles of the time. For the past five or so years Beau Wanzer, a local electronic musician himself (and one of the founders of the brilliantly insane annual Synthesizer Chili Cook-Off), has hosted a night the first Tuesday of the month at Danny’s called Hot on the Heels; if you close your eyes during the sets of minimal techno, EBM, and Italo disco it’s easy to imagine that it’s 1984 and you’re in a room full of people dressed like German existentialist new-wavers and not modern-day hipsters....

The Glass Menagerie, Mary-Arrchie Theatre Co. To prepare for his role as Tom, narrator and errant son in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, Hans Fleischmann spent more than a year doing nothing—at least when it came to cutting his hair. He ended up with an unholy mess atop his head and a beard to make a rat’s nest look like a model home. “Mothers tended to hold their children’s hands a little tighter while I was around,” Fleischmann says....

For several years Terrell Jones and Joseph “Fresh Goods” Robinson have been throwing parties and one-offs in conjunction with their streetwear brand, Vita Morte. In February they launched Feed the Homies, an event that Jones describes as “a cool-guys version of Cheers.” Every Monday the pair take over 6 Corners in Wicker Park and offer up food deals—including a $5 chicken and waffle plate—set to a hot hip-hop soundtrack. Sure, Kelsey Grammer’s Frasier Crane never chomped down on a chicken wing while a jukebox blasted Kanye West and company’s “Mercy,” but the spirit of camaraderie that reigned on Cheers permeates Feed the Homies (sans the laugh track)....

SHOESEccentric Breaks and Beats(Numbero) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » These days “bootlegger” usually just means “pirate”—someone illegally copying music off the Internet or selling unauthorized CD-R copies outside the Mega Mall. But the Numero folks apply it to the likes of underground hip-hop producer Madlib and R & B revivalist Mayer Hawthorne, both of whom they allege have sampled Numero releases or put them on mixes without permission....

Edging closer to musical theater with The Cotton Mouth Club, Chicago Dance Crash nevertheless remains edgy. The barroom setting and lack of dialogue bring to mind Twyla Tharp’s Broadway hit Come Fly Away. But instead of Sinatra, OutKast and Michael Jackson provide the tracks, as 17 dancers storm the stage in an avalanche of hip-hop, breaking, popping, contemporary dance, and a bit of swing. A 1929 speakeasy is the hedonistic scene of the first act, while the second, also galvanized by ferocious flirting and fighting, takes place in a bar in 1989....

Q I’m writing to thank you. I remember reading your definition of santorum—”the frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the by-product of anal sex”—when it first appeared. I remember thinking it was a cute way to make fun of a dickhead politician. I never thought it would go this far. But after Iowa, Rick Santorum is in the spotlight again. And so is that frothy mixture. And that’s fucking awesome....

QI am a young gay man who has been so freaked out by the idea of catching an STI that I haven’t gotten with anyone for two years. But last night, I hooked up with a cute 21-year-old trans boy, and maybe because it was a person with lady parts, I let caution go, and no condom was used. How worried should I be about having made a baby with a person who is way too young to have one?...

Bluegrass is usually thought of as a folk idiom. Jazz, on the other hand, is typically considered a music of innovation. Bluegrass is traditional and backward-looking hill music made by people who started scraping away at that one bow out in some godforsaken holler in Ireland, kept it up all the way across the Atlantic, and didn’t stop even after they’d crawled up into some godforsaken holler in Kentucky. Jazz, on the other hand, started metastasizing fecundly as soon as it was spawned, sprouting an evolutionary tree that connects King Oliver to Louis Armstrong to Duke Ellington to Miles Davis to John Coltrane to Ornette Coleman to the scrawling noise of John Zorn....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In his very little time on Earth he’s managed to carve out your complete, full-blown, multifaceted career as a “food personality.” He hosts a weekend show on Food Network, Good Deal With Dave Lieberman, and an online series called Dave Does, has authored two cookbooks (Young and Hungry and Dave’s Dinners), apparently still works part-time as a private chef and caterer, has designed menus for Delta Airlines, is a spokesperson for Amstel Light and also hosts/produces segments on the Annheiser-Busch Here’s to Beer web site....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In this week’s Food & Drink Mike Sula reviews Trenchermen, the long-awaited union of brothers Pat and Mike Sheerin, veterans of, respectively, the Signature Room and Blackbird. Teaming up with impresarios Kevin Heisner and Matt Eisler, they’ve transformed the former bathhouse that housed Spring into a darkly gorgeous space with a steampunkish air that “presents a discombobulating contrast to the precise, elegantly arranged plates the brothers are putting forth....