Impress These Apes ComedySportz 929 W. Belmont 773-549-8080 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There’s a lot that can go wrong here. Impress These Apes is an eight-week talent competition, now in its fifth iteration, in which contestants prepare assigned acts—stand-up with a puppet, say, or anti-comedy—to be judged American Idol-style by “hyper-intelligent apes from the future” (three comedians in masks). The acts might easily flop—or, worse, they might not be bad enough to elicit sufficient zingers from the apes....

Cine-File cine-file.info Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I seldom worry about other newspapers scooping the Reader on local film events, but it’s another story with Cine-File, the site whose weekly roundup covers the fringe, the fringe of the fringe, and beyond. Launched in February 2007 by Darnell Witt, it began by linking to reviews in the Reader and other pubs, but in the years since then it’s built up a fine stable of enthusiasts who contribute their own writing, including several past and present employees of the Odd Obsession video store (Ben Sachs, Kalvin Henely, Joe Rubin, Ignatius Vishnevetsky)....

This chart shows how many alleged violators were caught by each camera between the beginning of 2007 and the end of April 2008, and how any of those have paid up. Of those who haven’t, a select few contested the charges and either won or are still fighting; most of the others are still in the city’s system. (The highlighted intersections had cameras installed after January 2007 and therefore haven’t generated data for the full 16 months....

But several others who’ve criticized him over court and incarceration policies are due to face the voters again next year, including county board president Toni Preckwinkle and sheriff Tom Dart. Maybe they need to make headlines, but Evans wants to be clear that he doesn’t. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » He swears that he doesn’t even revile these people, even though everyone knows Preckwinkle unseated Evans for Fourth Ward alderman in a bitter 1991 race, and Dart has portrayed himself as a reformer battling the backward justice system since taking office seven years ago....

TRACES Broadway Playhouse Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The seven cast members—six men and one woman—are nearly all Cirque du Soleil vets, but the directors/choreographers, Shana Carroll and Gypsy Snider, have roots in San Francisco’s Pickle Family Circus. An offshoot of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, Pickle drew on some of the same community-centered, egalitarian principles as the Mimes while also making room for world-class clowning by the likes of Bill Irwin, Geoff Hoyle, and Snider’s stepfather, Larry Pisoni....

DECONSTRUCTING TYRONE: A NEW LOOK AT BLACK MASCULINITY IN THE HIP-HOP GENERATION | NATALIE HOPKINSON AND NATALIE Y. MOORE (CLEIS PRESS) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But while evenhandedness can be a virtue, it can easily tip over into a bland refusal to explore difficult positions–or to take any position at all. Tyrone’s authors are journalists (Moore teaches at Columbia College and writes for, among others, the Chicago Tribune; Hopkinson is a staff writer at the Washington Post), and they’ve essentially stitched together a book from a bunch of moderately insightful feature stories....

HONEYDRIPPER DIRECTED AND WRITTEN BY JOHN SAYLESWITH DANNY GLOVER, CHARLES S. DUTTON, YAYA DACOSTA, GARY CLARK JR., LISA GAY HAMILTON, MABLE JOHN, STACY KEACH, VONDIE CURTIS-HALL, MARY STEENBURGEN, KEB’ MO’, AND SAYLES. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The brief flashback in the middle of Honeydripper‘s climactic sequence is a good indication of how labored Sayles’s treatment of images continues to be. The flashback—it comes when Tyrone “Pine Top” Purvis (Danny Glover) is about to break up a fight between a couple of angry customers in his Honeydripper Lounge—isn’t just clunky as visual storytelling and phony in its florid, bloody action and garish setting, it’s seriously underimagined....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last week Mike Sula reviewed Nellcote, Jared Van Camp’s Stones-inspired luxe-meets-louche villa on Randolph Street. This week it’s Balena, like Nellcote, an ambitious pan-Italian-inspired cucina offering pizza, handmade pastas, house-made breads, and shareable plates. The difference: under Chris Pandel and a couple marquee members of his team at the Bristol, preparations are unfussy and “resolutely rustic” as opposed to decadent, and the atmosphere, rather than sceney, is big-hearted and easygoing....

It took her more than a decade, but saxophonist and composer Matana Roberts has arrived at a full expression of her aesthetic. In the late 90s, when she still lived in Chicago, she impressed small local audiences at the Velvet Lounge and the Empty Bottle, playing mostly in Sticks & Stones, a trio with bassist Joshua Abrams and drummer Chad Taylor that mixed post-Ornette Coleman grace with 60s free-jazz turbulence. Since then her horn playing has grown even stronger and more fearless—the 2011 quartet record Live in London, on Barry Adamson’s Central Control label, demonstrates just how much more—and her musical vision has evolved into something deep, multifaceted, and powerful....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But there’s no question that in spite of a four-year absence from record stores, Michael Jackson knows how to reenter the public consciousness with a vengeance. This time he did it with a video [“Black or White”] whose last four minutes show him dancing, smashing the windows of a car, tossing a garbage can through a storefront, and simulating masturbation — a video he almost immediately withdrew and reedited....

See our 2011 New Year’s Eve Guide. Black Ensemble Theater A performance of “the best of the best” of Black Ensemble Theater follows a champagne and hors d’oeuvres reception. After the show there’s an open mike and dancing. 8 PM-1 AM, Black Ensemble Theater, 4520 N. Beacon, 773-769-5541, blackensembletheater.org, $100. Crobar Includes an open bar (till midnight), champagne toast, party favors, and balloon drop. 12/31, 8 PM-4 AM, Crobar, 1543 N....

When Aaron Siskind arrived in Chicago in 1951 to teach photography at the Institute of Design (formerly the New Bauhaus), he was in the midst of a creative metamorphosis. During the 1930s he had been a member of the Workers Film and Photo League in New York and took documentary photographs, mostly of daily life in Harlem. In the mid-40s, though, he spent a summer in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and his subject matter took a turn from concrete pictures of people to sometimes abstract images of objects....

Onstage Ron White wears all black, smokes cigars, and sips (and “sweats”) scotch. His wide smile and tales of laziness and boozing might make him appear happy-go-lucky, but by the end of his routine it’s clear he’s been to hell and back. A big Texan, White served in Vietnam, overcame a drug addiction, and sold windows before resorting to comedy; his career took off when he joined the Blue Collar Comedy team part-time....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I still rue that I was out of town last summer when percussionist Doug Perkins organized and presented a performance of Inuksuit, a massive outdoor percussion piece by John Luther Adams, in Millennium Park. It was a terribly rainy, ugly day, which surely put a damper on the festivities, in which about a hundred percussionists were spread out in the park performing the multilayered work—it’s written for anywhere between nine and 99 players—but I still heard wonderful things about the event....

Thursday8 Victor Deme Friday9 Gerry Hemingway & Terrence McManusMC Lyte Saturday10 Beach FossilsBudos BandGerry Hemingway & Terrence McManusEmir Kusturica & the No Smoking OrchestraSweet Apple Sunday11 Etran Finatawa, Red BaraatEmir Kusturica & the No Smoking Orchestra Monday12 Budos BandEl GuinchoKing Louie’s Missing Monuments Tuesday13 Liturgy Postponed Wednesday14 Boy Thai BandDie AntwoordRed Baraat friday9 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » MC LYTE Her days of hit albums are behind her, but MC Lyte is an indelible force in hip-hop....

NORTH FACE Written and directed by Philipp Stölzl Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Philipp Stölzl’s German drama North Face also deals with actual events, offering plenty of thrills and spectacular vistas. But it also harks back to the German Bergfilme genre popularized by the geologist, photographer, and avid mountaineer Arnold Fanck. A completely self-taught filmmaker, Fanck had seen only one motion picture before he shot footage of sportsmen on the slopes for his 1919 silent film The Miracle of Skiing....

The big news about this year’s Chicago Jazz Festival is that it’s movin’ on up—that is, it’s heading several blocks north from Grant Park to Millennium Park. The switch has required some logistical wizardry, since the new grounds are smaller than the fest’s longtime digs—the Millennium Park layout locates its four stages closer together, which could easily mean more sound bleed (a problem that plagued some of the smaller stages even in Grant Park)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » God, UFOs, spirituality, art … a bit like losing yourself in a hallway of talismen, the empty invocations reverberating off the walls. Not that I’ve anything against the idea, mind you–of cinematic art, or “aahhrrt,” the more accessible scare quotes variant–only the uses to which it’s all too commonly put. Here’s an example: art as a rubric that privileges before the fact, as if close, burrowing analysis–this is what’s happening, this is how it’s done, through assorted camera angles and movements (close-ups that implicate, distant shots that hold you at arm’s length), blocking and editing strategies, the whole panoply of technical intuitions and ideas in search of a desired end (or maybe not even that, just inspired serendipity)–weren’t enough to get the point across....

Andrew A. Nelles/Sun-Times Media CTU president Karen Lewis, addressing the City Club in November On January 10, teachers at a Seattle high school announced that they would refuse to administer a standardized test they’re required to give to ninth graders. “We are not troublemakers nor do we want to impede the high functioning of our school,” the teachers at Garfield High School wrote in a letter. But they said they wouldn’t “continue to participate in a practice that harms our school and our students....

There is just one replica in the entire world of the great icon of Italian culture known as the Leaning Tower of Pisa—obviously not counting the little plastic souvenir versions for sale in Pisan gift shops. And it’s in Niles, across the street from the two great icons of American culture known as Target and Costco! But the Leaning Tower of Niles does not exist simply to honor multiculturalism. Robert A....