The Blackout Fest isn’t the only big thing HoZac Records has cookin’. The label’s 100th release, now being mixed, comes out this summer, and it’s a doozy! The 17-track compilation Trunk City Junk captures a slew of one-off garage bands that came together between 2003 and ’07 and starred a real parade of current and former midwestern scene fixtures: Alex White, Aaron “A-Ron” Orlowski (Baseball Furies, Outer Minds), Wes Kerstens (Clone Defects, Red Orchestra), Brian Miller (Functional Blackouts), Odie Wilson (Baseball Furies), Nathan Webber (Vee Dee), Zach Medearis (Outer Minds), and Chris Anderson (Sang des Loups, Black Beauties)....

I was up to my neck in tax increment financing documents last week when the phone calls and text messages started coming in: You have to hear what Tom Allen’s saying in the City Council. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Everyone in this room is nervous because we have been told that if anyone messes with the TIFs, you are going to lose your park projects, street projects,” Allen said....

Just like pizza, there’s no such thing as bad sushi. It certainly seems that way anyway, considering the endless proliferation of sashimi, nigiri, and maki in everything from drugstores to gas stations. Good rice, good fish, and proper service also were in effect at Arami, the Wicker Park sushi bar that Park abruptly left last June, leaving a devoted fan base bereft and frighteneded, wondering where the best sushi south of Peterson Avenue could now be found....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » To refresh your memory, Kozicki’s a Bridgeport resident and member of the 11th Ward Democratic organization run by Cook County commissioner John Daley, the mayor’s brother. During the Sorich corruption trial Kozicki testified that he had altered the interview rating of 19-year-old Andrew Ryan (son of a high-ranking union official) to ensure that Ryan scored high enough to get a building inspector’s job for which other applicants were more qualified....

Bratty Pack? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the years I’ve been reading the Reader, I’ve never been so outraged by an article. I am not at all criticizing Jessica Hopper’s part, she did her job as a reporter/journalist and I respect that. Bands who have been playing their music years before these kids were born are still “paying their dues,” and it’s insulting that they think they’re owed something for the handful of years they’ve been playing....

The much buzzed-about Ing (951 W. Fulton, 855-834-6464, ingrestaurant.com), the latest project from Moto chef Homaro Cantu, opened on Tuesday in the former Otom space. General manager and sommelier Garrett Kern said that the noodles, which will be hand pulled at a noodle station, have been in the works the longest of all the menu components. Executive chef Thomas Bowman‘s contemporary Asian menu is divided into categories like Heating (e.g., oysters with uni, foie gras, and smoke), Boiling (three types of noodle soup), Melting (Wagyu beef cooked on a “firebrick” and served with ponzu and a soy rice krispie), and Sweetening (waffles frozen in a waffle iron soaked in liquid nitrogen and served with coconut, mango sorbet, and stout)....

I think there are three arguments here. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » We can’t claw back the money on a strictly legal basis. But that’s not clear at all; there’s considerable disagreement. “The testaments to ‘the best and the brightest‘ – here, referring to the people of AIG Financial Products – reflect, I don’t know, either absolute, brazen obscenity, or a world-historical example of making the mistake of believing your own hype....

On the Bowery (1957), Lionel Rogosin’s landmark film about skid row in Manhattan, was nominated for an Oscar in the category of best documentary. If the same thing happened today there would surely be an uproar, because the movie is partly scripted and staged. Rogosin, an affluent businessman making his first film, was inspired by Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief (1948) to create something of real immediacy that would blur the line between drama and documentary....

Just about every Sunday in the warmer months members of Chicago Bike Polo convene on a grassy patch in the southeast corner of Humboldt Park for a leisurely day of games. The average turnout is about a dozen guys on a range of wheels, from mountain bikes to fixed-gear roadsters. They play three-on-three, one match at a time, and snack and drink beer between matches. When nine members met up on a recent Thursday evening, however, the vibe was decidedly less casual....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Speaking of Nick Day, he just pointed me to Nick Tosches’s recent and terrific Vanity Fair piece on Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish market and the evolution of the American taste for fish from Chicken of the Sea to sashimi. It touches upon loads of interesting stuff (Day notes that it’s everything that this book should have been), but remarkably Tosches never once notes the environmental cost of harvesting bluefin tuna–the market star that can grow to 12 feet long and 1,500 pounds and that environmental writer Charles Clover describes in The End of the Line as “disgracefully overfished” and “one of the ocean’s most astounding and endangered mega-fauna”–or of air-freighting said tuna from Massachusetts to Tokyo and then back to New York City and the $60,000 blond-wood sushi bar at Masa over the course of three days....

Eugene Schulter has been alderman of the 47th Ward for nearly a quarter century and four and a half years ago became its undisputed boss. But long before the ward, which includes most of North Center and Lincoln Square, was taken over by a Mayor Daley loyalist and one of the most cautious cats in the City Council it had a much different kind of politician at its helm—a fiery Republican who railed against Machine politics and gave the first Mayor Daley fits....

The Hong Kong comedy Vulgaria—which screened recently at River East 21 and returns to town this week for two shows at the Gene Siskel Film Center—might strike some as a collection of dirty jokes. But in fact it’s more a celebration of the dirty joke as a narrative form: the movie’s structure and much of its detail evoke those lewd shaggy-dog stories we all heard in middle school but share less often as we get older....

July 13, 1979 February 2, 1979 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Friday the 13th By Lawrence Wechsler “The 13th of the month is more likely to occur on a Friday than on any other day of the week,” or anyway that’s what the bespectacled stranger on the bus insisted to me about ten days ago – “and you can prove it,” he said. ....

There Deta Lekic herself welcomed us, pouring me a strong coffee in a glass mug and, once I was warm enough to take off my coat, propelling me back into the little kitchen where—never mind the “more”—she made pretty much one thing only: Macedonian pita (aka burek or borek), flaky phyllo stuffed, coiled into a spiral, and baked until golden brown. Her dexterity with the fragile dough convinced me this was not a thing to be tried at home, at least not mine....

My Children, My Africa INFO 773-871-3000 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » O’Neal had come to SMU from Canada, where he’d been producing the Stratford Festival. Before that, in the 70s, he’d been a leading light in Chicago’s off-Loop theater scene as an original member of the innovative Organic Theater Company, appearing in the troupe’s hugely popular science-fantasy stage serial Warp! and other shows....

Between the time I leave my office and the moment I take my seat at whatever show I’m seeing on a given night, I generally have about 15 minutes for dinner. Or, more accurately, a late feeding. What that means in a practical sense is that I’m well acquainted with the location of the McDonald’s nearest most theaters you could name. Chipotle is a welcome changeup for me. (Grilled vegetables! Guacamole!...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Spectacle may be an odd word to describe productions as evidently cheap as Yilmaz Güney’s, which abound with slapdash editing and bare-bones sets. Yet the films I saw at Doc Films’s Güney series this Saturday afternoon—Bride of the Earth (1968) and The Hungry Wolves (1969)—conveyed a mythic sense of landscape and story, often using one to reinforce the other....

In March 2008 guitarist Derek Miller, formerly of Florida hardcore band Poison the Well, moved to Brooklyn to find his fortune and took a job as a waiter. Over the past few months, though, what began as his home-recording project has become one of the buzziest bands in the country. With a string of MP3s that combine Miller’s howling guitars and booming beats with pop-chart-worthy vocals from Alexis Krauss—formerly of short-lived all-girl band RubyBlue—Sleigh Bells have earned accolades from Pitchfork, top honors on a year-end list compiled by New Yorker pop critic Sasha Frere-Jones, and a spot on the roster of M....

Wicker Park Fest returns this weekend, and in its ninth year it’s bigger than ever. The festival includes the usual merchants, artists, and food vendors, but the big attraction is the music. Starting at 1 PM both days, a massive lineup of indie rock, pop, punk, folk, and more will fill three stages spread out along Milwaukee Avenue: the North Stage (at North Avenue, of course), the South Stage (at Wood), and the Center Stage (midway between the other two)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I love spring training–the relaxed playfulness mixed with the gradual increase in the tension of the competition as the regular season approaches, pitchers running sprints in the outfield as the game goes on. And one doesn’t necessarily need to be there in person. Chicago fans watching this this afternoon’s spring exhibition rematch between the Cubs and the White Sox at Tucson Electric Park on Channel 9 got an unusual taste of that mixture....