Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Looked at from the perspective of workflow and time management, my job might appear to be less about writing about music and more about sifting through a relentless deluge of press releases that keeps my inbox in a state of constant ridiculousness. Most of them are utterly useless to me. Today’s haul so far includes news about this month’s beer specials at some north-side jock bar, lineup confirmations for a few small music festivals on the other side of the country, and an extremely in-depth notice about the front man for a North Carolina-based “Ultimate Michael Jackson Tribute Band,” who’s recovering from a bout with pneumonia—which on one hand I guess I’m glad for the guy, but on the other hand I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with this information or why it’s being sent to me, aside from the fact that e-mails don’t cost money....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Occasionally I’ll get a bit despondent reading through the same music-related stories clogging up my RSS feed—today it’s Hollywood Reporter‘s piece on Arcade Fire’s marketing campaign for Reflektor—and want to blast some loud, fast, and visceral tunes to get my heart rate back up. For today’s adrenaline injection I’ve turned to Big Zit, a hardcore outfit from northwest Indiana that whips out mangled, acid-fried guitar riffs while its singer wails in a fashion that reminds me of early Bad Brains....

QMy husband was 28 when I met him and a virgin. When we started having sex, he opened up about being “different.” He wanted to wear panties, he wanted me to have sex with other men, he wanted me to make fun of his tiny penis. Didn’t love the stuff, but whatever. Now it’s a thousand times worse. He goes to Victoria’s Secret and tells the salesgirls he is being punished by his wife for wearing her panties and that I am “forcing him” to go buy some of his own....

Therapist as ally, therapist as foe, therapist as ally mistaken for foe–“Shrink,” a Fillet of Solo Festival program produced with Tellin’ Tales Theatre, rings humorous changes on therapy. Most of its monologuists have been on the receiving end, but Judith Harding, who directs a theater program for special-needs kids, delivers it. In her very funny Therapeutic Wreck she describes a disastrous evening trying to get her “clients” onstage for a donor gala at the Hyatt Regency....

Drake mid-dance move Yesterday Odd Future mastermind-slash-lightning-rod Tyler, the Creator tweeted the most succinct and spot-on appraisal of Drake’s new single, “Started From the Bottom,” that I’ve seen yet: “I ENJOY THE STARTED FROM THE BOTTOM SONG ALOT.” I too enjoy the “Started From the Bottom” song. It’s an easy song to like, with a chorus that Drake manages to transmute from an awkward mouthful of words to an inescapably catchy hook, and the kind of aspiration-provoking “me and my friends living our wildest dreams” kind of lyrical theme that Drake’s long leaned on to help offset the public perception of him as a spoiled child actor coasting off a full tank of upper-middle-class privilege....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mike Sula and other Reader critics give their picks for the best new restaurants of 2010; along with the expected—Big Star, Girl & the Goat, the Purple Pig—there are some lower in profile, like West Town’s Arami (which now has full liquor service including a smart selection of sakes) and Branch 27. In the listings are other notable restaurants of 2010, among them Bucktown’s Chilapan, Ukie Village’s Ruxbin, and Andersonville’s Vincent....

A first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Growing up in Italy, I loved to spend time in the kitchen with my mother. Especially on Sunday, which was our only holiday. We used to make gnocchi many times. We would put big old potatoes—the starchy potatoes you need for gnocchi—in a pressure cooker for about 45 minutes....

Goose Island Your food future doesn’t begin and end with an impending Thanksgiving feast. There’s plenty of post-turkey eating (and drinking) to be done. For instance: Fork in Lincoln Square, the best farm-to-table restaurant you didn’t know was one, will be hosting a dinner for the Green City Market on Tuesday, December 2, featuring beers from Perennial Artisan Ales. The star attraction will be Peace Offering, an American brown ale with maple-roasted cushaw squash from Yellowtree Farm....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I laughed more during Charles Fairbanks’s four-and-a-half-minute video Wrestling With My Father (screening this Saturday at the Nightingale as part of a program of Fairbanks’s work) than I did during the entire 110 minutes of We’re the Millers—and I cared a lot more about its characters too, even though all they do is watch high school wrestling matches. I make this comparison not as a slight at mainstream comedy on the whole (I don’t find Wrestling funnier than The World’s End, for instance), but to highlight the crucial role that humor plays in Fairbanks’s videos....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Between Bites is a new food-related storytelling series featuring local writers or personalities and benefiting a local cause—in this case Un86’d, which helps hospitality professionals with medical bills or other needs. The theme of the first event is Food Firsts; the writers reading will be Anthony Todd (Chicagoist), Ari Bendersky (Crain‘s), Chandra Ram (Plate), Heather Sperling (Tasting Table Chicago), Joe Campagna (Chicago Food Snob) and Kiki Luthringshausen (Beautyandherfeast....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last summer Kalebich’s employer, Allied Waste, one of the biggest waste companies in the country, opened a new plant in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood to sort and recover the wood, paper, metal, concrete, rock, drywall, and other stuff generated by area construction and demolition work. Demand for this material has swelled over the last few years—the use of recycled products helps qualify buildings for LEED certification and other “green” designations, which helps developers market them to environmentally conscious clients....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Chicago comedy veteran Jeff Garlin is donating a walk-on role on HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm to the Annoyance Theatre’s benefit for Tony HighHorse, Monday, 1/26. A 29-year old Iraq war veteran and cousin of Annoyance actor George McAuliffe, HighHorse was recently diagnosed with terminal cancer. “While it is suspected that his illness is military related, the government will not give him full disability coverage because it cannot be proven,” says an Annoyance press release....

Apparently there are two ways to experience Barrelhouse Flat. One is to ask to be seated in the more intimate and presumably less drafty (and, by virtue of its location up a flight of pesky steps, less fratty) second-floor salon. The other is to sit downstairs—and not only sit downstairs, but fail to order the pig’s face poutine. Those are the two mistakes I made. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

The whole premise of Julia Child’s cookbooks and TV shows was that anyone with a basic knowledge of the kitchen could master French cooking. But have you ever looked at Julia’s croissant recipe? All that buttering and folding and rolling is enough to drive a sane person to culinary school. Judy Contino, however, was not intimidated by the art of French pastry—or by the insanity of a restaurant kitchen. She learned croissants (and cake and ganache) on the job at Ambria and Printer’s Row and as the corporate pastry chef for Lettuce Entertain You before opening her own bakery, Bittersweet, in Lakeview....

AP Photo/The Guardian Edward Snowden A friend asked what I thought about the recent revelations that the National Security Agency is collecting and storing complete records of our telephone and Internet activities. I said I didn’t know. We need to be kept safe. But no one likes Big Brother. The sheer volume of data guarantees that no one is paying any attention to most of it. But can we defend a government surveillance operation on the grounds that it’s too massive to worry about?...

Here’s a new saga for the annals of runaway boards and crusty founders:Legendary photography mentor Richard Stromberg has been fired by the board of the Chicago Photography Center, the organization created just six years ago mostly to make sure there’d always be a place where he could teach. Stromberg says he’s been locked out of the handsome, $1.2 million Lincoln Avenue facility financed by his supporters, outfitted with his own darkroom equipment, and built, in part, with his labor....

Tully is a former Chicagoan who was recently published in the Windy City Queer anthology. “No,” I said. “I don’t smoke, you still smoke?” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Cigarettes is my uncle in brown slippers heating up alphabet soup for me in the south-side house we’ve had for 28 years. Cigarettes is breaks at my first waitressing job at Clarke’s. Cigarettes is singeing my eyelashes with a lighter that jumped to reach that 104-degree sun at the Morse Red Line stop....

Tom Moulton One of the first real breakthroughs I had after joining SoundCloud was stumbling upon a user called R_co, who, instead of posting their own creations (at the time the platform was mostly used for dance music and DJ mixes, although its user base has since expanded), would upload entire sets by other DJs. A lot of them were contemporary German techno types whom I wasn’t particularly grabbed by, but interspersed throughout were ones by the DJs who more or less invented deejaying as we know it....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Politico’s Mike Allen reported this morning that Barack Obama, in a forthcoming interview with Rolling Stone, indirectly calls Mitt Romney a “bullshitter.” Rolling Stone‘s editor, Eric Bates, told Obama that he’d asked his six-year-old if she had anything she wanted to pass along to the president. “You can do it,” the kid responded. According to the article Obama, hearing this, “grinned”: “‘You know, kids have good instincts,’ Obama offered....

Gossip Wolf hit up the garage sale of a member of Disappears last weekend and picked up some hot gossip for cheap: as drummer Graeme Gibson departs for Portland, Sonic Youth‘s Steve Shelley will jet in from New Jersey to lend a hand. Front man Brian Case confirms that Shelley will be playing live with the group in support of their forthcoming Guider but adds that Shelley “is not a member of the band but a friend who will be playing with us for as long as he is able or wants to....