Presented by the Gene Siskel Film Center, the Black Harvest festival showcases films and videos by black artists from around the world, with screenings continuing through Thursday, September 2. Following are reviews of selected films screening from Friday, August 13, through Thursday, August 19; for more information and a complete schedule see siskelfilmcenter.org. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Everyday Black Man After being denied a bank loan, a middle-aged grocer and lapsed Christian (Henry Brown) overcomes his misgivings and accepts a new business partner, a young black Muslim (Omari Hardwick) whose confidence and drive make a strong impression....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Sun-Times carried a big story announcing the winner of its “Zell No” video contest: 22-year-old Katie Hamilton of Glen Ellyn with “We’re Not Gonna Change It,” a rip on Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It.” Then the Tribune gleefully revealed that Hamilton is a Tribune editorial board intern and the $1,000 prize is going to Chicago Tribune Charities....

When the Fisk, Crawford, and State Line coal-fired power plants were built roughly a century ago, they were gleaming symbols of progress and modernization. Fisk made history when it opened in Pilsen in 1903: its five-megawatt vertical steam-driven turbine was the largest of its kind. Crawford went online in 1924, and in 1929 State Line opened on a peninsula jutting into Lake Michigan Lake Calumet just over the Indiana border; one of its generating units was then the largest in the world....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Just a few weeks earlier, Emanuel and other officials held a similar ribbon cutting on the far-south side for a new Walmart whose jobs were just as desperately needed, and also subsidized with millions of public dollars. The high-profile big-box openings send a message that after years of decline, good things are happening in some of Chicago’s most depressed areas—thanks in no small part to the investment of tax funds....

Carrie Spitler, Neighborhood Writing Alliance executive director, is reading: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’m about a third of the way through. The story is about this woman, Henrietta Lacks, whose cells are being used by people who are studying cancer. The thing I love about it is that it tells this story of an individual who’s hidden behind this huge corporate business. All of us want cancer research to move ahead, but it’s being done without any recognition of who’s being studied, down to the cellular level....

The Smart Museum’s upcoming show “Heartland” is based on a cheesy stunt. Curators from the Smart and the Netherlands’ Van Abbemuseum trekked out to backwaters like Detroit and Kansas City to find out what sort of art those crazy middle Americans are up to. (Leave it to a Chicago institution to package its neighbors as outsider artists.) What they discovered is what a lot of us already knew: that the region has a strong tradition of collective and communal art making....

On February 4, the day they were scheduled to talk about the possibility of reforming the city’s mobile food vendor regulations, 43rd Ward alderman Vi Daley kept Phillip Foss waiting at the entrance of her office for about an hour. He’d developed it during a forced lull at work. In December Foss—whose acerbic and sometimes ribald wit can be sampled on his blog, the Pickled Tongue, and Twitter feed—had openly castigated a server on his Facebook page....

The primeval fear that a bigger, stronger animal could come along and snatch your kill was probably the root of mankind’s first eating disorder. That’s partly why the discovery of fire was so important to early humanoids, huddled around blazing embers not just for warmth and protection but also to take the time necessary to roast a sizzling mastodon joint and enjoy it in the nonthreatening company of friends and family....

Artisans 21 Gallery Founded in the 60s by craft-sale refugees who wanted a more permanent venue, this nonprofit co-op is owned and operated by its member artists (currently there are 21 of them, and they’re accepting applications). The gallery, which sells arts and crafts including glasswork, paintings, ceramics, and textiles, was located at Harper Court until the shopping center’s sale to the U. of C. forced it out last year. Mon-Fri 11 AM-6 PM, Sat 10 AM-6 PM, Sun noon-6 PM, 1373 E....

Writing about Crystal Fairy & the Magical Cactus two weeks ago, I speculated that Sebastian Silva’s direction of actors in that film—guiding them through extended improvisations within a tightly organized structure—may owe something to his background as a musician. This thought occurred to me again while watching Blue Jasmine, Woody Allen’s latest comedy-drama, which opens this week. Allen has long moonlighted as a jazz clarinetist, and he too seems to cast his movies as though preparing jam sessions, bringing together a diverse set of players to see how they’ll interact....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » All movies serve as escapism: no matter what you’re watching, it’s always someone else’s experience. As I argued in this week’s issue, the recent art film The Kid With a Bike works as escapist entertainment because its writer-directors, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, incorporate aspects of popular storytelling to bring greater urgency to a realistic story. There’s a similar interaction between fantasy and realism in much of the so-called Slow Cinema that’s become a familiar presence at film festivals in the past decade (Sukhdev Sandhu provided an overview of the trend in the Guardian a few weeks ago)....

Now that Barack Obama has secured the nomination of Democratic candidate for president, he and his handlers are ramping up their efforts to immunize him from his Chicago past. A piece that appeared recently in Salon may be giving us a glimpse of the Obama team’s strategy. “Look Homeward, Obama” was actually written by a former Daley speechwriter, Dan Conley, who admits he got that job through a connection with Axelrod; Conley’s wife still works for the mayor....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A lot of the complaints about There Will Be Blood (and there’ve been more than a few) strike these kinds of disenchanted notes: “a thudding bore,” “tempered and wrought, to the point of dullness … its very scale almost obscures its blankness,” or in general simply wondering “what’s the point of it all?”—though in fact the passage I’ve quoted is from Pauline Kael’s notorious pan of Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, one of the “100 best films of all time” if you believe what the critics tell you....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’m no fan of Javon Jackson’s most recent album, Now (Palmetto, 2006), where the tenor saxophonist puts a tepid spin on R & B, mixing originals and covers of tunes associated with, e.g., Robert Flack and James Brown. But he’s one of mainstream jazz’s most reliable players, a graduate of the informal school of hard bop known as the Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers....

The Chef: Ryan Poli (Tavernita)The Challenger: Chris Curren (Stout Barrel House & Galley)The Ingredient: Eel Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “They’re so creepy,” Poli said. He and his staff discovered just how slippery eels are when one slithered out of its container and fell onto the floor; it took several tries to retrieve the mucus-covered fish, which had a tendency to slip out of the hands of its would-be captors....

The Chicago Public Schools is a system so broke it can’t afford sophomore sports, wants assistant coaches to work for free, and has summoned hundreds of teachers to the principal’s office to let them know they’ll be laid off over the summer. But it can still afford to pay 133 central office officials more than $100,000 a year. So I decided to do a little digging. After spending hours plowing through the 350-page 2009-2010 CPS budget, I discovered that contrary to cutting wages at the central office, Huberman and the board had given raises to scores of top bureaucrats....

Seafood Spots LUNCH, DINNER: MONDAY-SATURDAY | CLOSED SUNDAY | RESERVATIONS NOT ACCEPTED | cash only Lunch, Dinner: seven days | Open Late: Friday & Saturday till 11 BREAKFAST, LUNCH, DINNER: SEVEN DAYS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In a 1998 Reader story, Calumet Fisheries’ Hector Morales lamented the decline in business that came with the death of the steel industry on the southeast side....

Lead Story As the Department of Veterans Affairs struggles to deal with its immense backlog of disability claims–it’s at 600,000 cases now and sure to get worse–some critics estimate that nearly a third of the veterans on the rolls are receiving lifetime compensation for common, minor, and often treatable ailments that didn’t necessarily result from their military service and don’t affect their ability to work. According to a March report by Scripps Howard, 124,000 veterans currently get monthly benefits for hemorrhoids, which alone may cost the department more than $14 million a year....

The back room of the “Ayn Rand School for Tots” All this month we’ll be reviewing the Oscar nominees for the best animated, live-action, and documentary short films, alternating daily between categories. Check back tomorrow for the next installment. This five-minute Simpsons cartoon played before the most recent Ice Age feature; and while it features a couple of satirical gags worthy of a good Simpsons episode, it feels closer in spirit to the kid-friendly entertainment of the Ice Age movies....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After I wrote a story I got an irate letter from the leader of the local chamber of commerce, whose members included the merchants I had quoted. Was she mad at the city for making life difficult for her members? Not at all. She was mad at her members for criticizing the local alderman, Tom Tunney. I suggested that she’s supposed to serve the interests of her dues paying members–not the alderman....