Kimpira at Masu Izakaya 1969 N. Halsted 773-435-9314 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Throughout history, burdock roots and leaves have had medicinal uses—both beneficial and bogus—in many cultures, including Native American and European. The nasty seed-sac burrs, which stick to clothing and even skin, inspired Swiss engineer George de Mestral to invent Velcro in 1948, after he and his dog went for a hike and returned home covered with them....

A high point of Iran’s first new wave, this 1965 masterpiece by Ebrahim Golestan takes its title from the classical Persian poet Sa’adi, who wrote, “What the old can see in a mud brick, youth can see in a mirror.” The philosophical implications of this are fully apparent in Golestan’s tale of a young man who finds a baby girl in his cab and spends a night with his girlfriend debating what to do with the infant....

As Mr. Emanuel says, “I swear a lot.” He also yells a lot, and in his sentences his favorite expletive can serve as subject, verb or adjective. . . . New York Times, November 6 The Federal Communications Commission defines “indecent speech” as “language or material that, in context, depicts or describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards for the broadcast medium, sexual or excretory activities and organs....

Music Rufus Wainwright Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Rufus Wainwright’s latest record, All Days Are Nights: Songs for Lulu—a collection of piano and voice performances—can’t help but feel stripped down,” writes Peter Margasak. “But Wainwright’s songs remain dense with harmony and movement, his singing is still florid, and in some ways the new album—recorded shortly after the death of his mother, idiosyncratic folk singer Kate McGarrigle—is as loaded with information as anything he’s done....

“THE GREATEST EVER CHICAGO BOOK” CONTEST • January 13, 2015 through January 18, 2015 shall constitute the second Round (“Round Two”); Sponsor and its parent, subsidiaries and affiliates are not responsible for late, lost, delayed, unclear, unintelligible, incomplete, misdirected, or ineligible entries which will be disqualified or for technical, hardware, or software malfunctions of any kind, lost or unavailable network connections, or failed, incorrect, incomplete, inaccurate, garbled or delayed electronic communications caused by the sender, or by any of the equipment or programming associated with or utilized in the Contest which may limit the ability to play or participate, or by any human error that may occur in the processing of the entries in the Contest....

Burnham Park Conceptualized by architect Daniel Burnham in the mid-1890s and home to the Century of Progress World’s Fair in 1933-’34, this six-mile-long lakefront park connects Grant Park to Jackson Park, encompassing McCormick Place, the Museum Campus, and Northerly Island. Accessible by the lakefront bike path, the stretch within Hyde Park includes Promontory Point (see separate entry), plus baseball fields, tennis courts, and several playgrounds. 425 E. McFetridge, 773-256-0949. —Kevin Warwick...

The Corboy Case The author appears to have the cooperation of the plaintiff. The attorney-client privilege belongs to the client, not the lawyer. If she wants you to see the records, they should not be turning them over redacted, with passages blotted out. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Corboy & Demetrio is an amazing law firm who has done nothing but good for this city and the citizens....

Katie Hovland Meat Wave In late January, local postpunk trio Meat Wave will finally be releasing new music, a follow-up to their out-of-control 2012 self-titled debut. The Brother EP, which will be out on the new, UK-based label Brace Yourself Records, is an odds-and-ends collection of old recordings, new songs, and demos for their next upcoming full-length. Today’s 12 O’Clock Track is a sample of Brother: a cover of “Mystery,” a classic tune off of Is This Real?...

Last October Dan Smith played a show at the Viaduct Theater with his solo ambient synth project, Red Electric Rainbow, and a few other artists. It was in some ways just another show, but it was the first he’d set up himself instead of just asking a booker for a slot for his band—and it opened the floodgates for him. Within a month he was working to organize something much more daunting: this weekend’s Neon Marshmallow Fest, also at the Viaduct, an extravaganza of experimental music featuring more than 90 acts spread across four days....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But who’s complaining? It’s been a wild and exciting week, and mine started auspiciously last Saturday, when within a few minutes Northwestern beat Minnesota with an interception returned for a touchdown, Purdue edged out Michigan with an old-school hook-and-ladder play, and Michigan State came back from 11 down in the fourth quarter to top Wisconsin by a point—all in the last 30 seconds of their games....

I didn’t see a lot of movies growing up. I was not allowed to watch television. So it was sort of a surprise when I was in high school that my mother suddenly was very enthusiastic about the idea of going to this silent film festival that had popped up in this little town in Maine where my grandfather lived. And so we went and that was the first time I ever realized that you could see old films on film—and probably that films were shown on film at all and not just some kind of apparition that was mysterious and similar to what you would see on a television screen....

History is a vast reservoir of dead facts and live arguments—a series of rhetorical bludgeons designed to beat the present into submission. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » And yet The Great Anti-War Cartoons as a whole isn’t all that convincing. In fact, it’s irritating. Part of the problem is Yoe’s decision to arrange the book thematically, so that, for instance, all the cartoons showing the globe are placed next to one another....

In our recent Food Issue, Cursive front man and recent Chicago transplant Tim Kasher spilled his guts about how much he appreciates a box of Velveeta Shells & Cheese. No shame in that game. The love letter to the processed-cheese product eventually led to a Twitter dialogue with Velveeta’s marketing campaign—which is called Eat Liquid Gold, and described by Kasher as “ultrawacky.” Discussed in their exchange: Kasher’s possible ability to consume an entire brick of Velveeta, Kasher’s possible ability to consume an entire house built out of Velveeta bricks....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » All right, having looked at the Cubs through the statistical prism of The Bill James Gold Mine 2008, let’s see what it says about the White Sox. First, the bullpen was awful last season. No surprise there. Excluding the closers — and Bobby Jenks was exceptional — Sox relievers posted a 5.98 earned-run average. The only stunning fact is that there was a worse team in the American League: the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, with a 6....

I assume Dave Mies and Aaron Mullan are joking when they claim that they formed Tall Firs by teaching one another to play guitar over the phone back in 1990, and then waited 11 years to play their first gig. But the catatonic music on their recent Ecstatic Peace debut suggests that it might not be far from the truth. Mullan has spent years as a Sonic Youth soundman, which might explain why his narcotic singing sounds like a cross between Thurston Moore and the garden-snake moan of Jandek....

Thomas Hardy’s novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles, about a poor country girl swept away and broken by modern life, has been transplanted from 19th-century England to 21st-century India by the prolific and adventurous Michael Winterbottom (24 Hour Party People, Tristram Shandy, A Mighty Heart, The Killer Inside Me). The new setting revivifies the harsh forces of class and gender at work in the story, as the sweet but inscrutable title character (Freida Pinto) falls under the spell of a wealthy young man (Riz Ahmed) and leaves her family in dusty Rajasthan for better wages in Mumbai and glamor at the margins of the film industry....

The economy continues to force music festivals nationwide to reconsider their missions, and the Chicago Blues Festival is no exception. In 2009 the Mayor’s Office of Special Events cut the schedule back to three days from four, and that change remains in effect for 2010. The lineup includes a much higher percentage of locals than usual, and you’d have to go back many years to find fewer acts with star power on the bill....

The overwhelming menu at Mark Bires and Mindy Friedler’s old West Loop sandwich shop Jerry’s has been preserved at their newer, larger Wicker Park location—which is to say it still reads like the obsessively detailed manifesto of a schizophrenic scribbling on an envelope. But that’s probably cold comfort to regulars back in the lunch-light West Loop, who may view the comparatively limited selection of po’boys at Bires and Friedler’s new Mac and Min’s with despair....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In each of the last two seasons, Northwestern went into its matchup with Michigan State needing a big win after looking decidedly meager in its earlier games. In 2006 the Cats pounced on State, building a shocking 38-3 lead by halftime … then uttered barely a meow in watching the Spartans stage the biggest rally in major college football history....

Jose Rodriguez felt the usual pangs of the foreign-exchange student when he arrived in tiny Decatur, Michigan, for a year of high school a decade ago. The little town just southeast of Kalamazoo offered enough opportunities for trying exotic foods like pasta and burgers. But there were no arepas, the fat, griddled corn cakes he’d eaten nearly every day for most of his life. Best of Chicago voting is live now....