Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “As far as the city is concerned, there has to be more recycling. There has to be recycling in everyone’s home and in every business. That’s all part of it. Whether it’s on the CTA, or on the Metra, or in a city park, there needs to be the ability to recycle. It needs to become everyone’s choice to do it and to make it better....

Last week US Air Guitar, the official association for people pretending to rock out, announced that the 2011 national finals for wannabe ax bros will take place July 23 at Metro. Air-guitar icon and author Björn Türoque, star of the documentary Air Guitar Nation, tells Gossip Wolf: “There’s an obvious joke about air guitar coming to the ‘Windy City,’ but we at US Air Guitar disdain the obvious joke. This is some serious shit going down in America’s heartland....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, as it’s formally known, allocates more than $7 billion nationally for environmental conservation and cleanup programs: about $4 billion to upgrade wastewater treatment systems, $2 billion to improve drinking water infrastructure, and $1 billion more to clean up hazardous waste, cut diesel emissions from bus fleets and equipment, redevelop brownfields, and remove polluting underground storage tanks....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “A lightning-quick, physical 6-footer who would have been unstoppable after they changed the hand-check rules in 2004, Williams had his moments as a rookie, including the 26-14-13 he slapped on J-Kidd and the Nets. He would have been a stud. . . . How did Jay’s injury change what transpired with Chicago over the next five years? Imagine Utah only getting one season out of Deron Williams and you have some idea....

Ian’s Party The annual punk-rock festival Ian’s Party is back this weekend. Now in its sixth year (its second in Chicago), the festival started out in Elgin as a three-day music fest staged around New Year’s Eve. According to Jim Miller, one of the fest’s creators, the dudes putting on the shows needed a name and reason for the event, and their buddy Ian lost a game of rock, paper, scissors to become the namesake....

Mad as Hell Teachers and students are supposed to sacrifice while the Board of Education—the seven-member body appointed by the mayor—approves a budget that nearly triples its allowance for “nonprofessional services.” Nearly triples its allowance for “memberships, subscriptions, seminars.” Nearly triples its allowance for travel expenses. More than doubles its allowance for “miscellaneous contingent projects.” Are you kidding me? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Now I am asked to forgo my raise and take furlough days?...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Somewhere in there aldermen also found time to sign off on the mayor’s appointments for police superintendent, chief procurement officer, and director of administrative hearings; and to approve more than $21 million to settle several police torture and misconduct cases, including four from the Burge era. Lots of aldermen had lots to say about all of these things, but that didn’t translate into much dissension on the record, since all these items received a grand total of one nay vote—from the Third Ward’s Pat Dowell, who gave a thumbs-down to the confirmation of new police chief Jody Weis because she was underwhelmed by his performance during a Q & A with aldermen on Monday....

Ciao Amore Ristorante Ciao Amore, a somewhat out-of-the-way place with lots of ambition and space to grow, is still getting its act together, though it promises to be quite a show. The cardboard-stiff Italian bread we started with and the cold coffee we closed with were sad, but what came in between was consistently delicious and at times exceptional. Chef Cesar Pineda responded enthusiastically to our request to just bring whatever was looking good....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Johnny Knoxville and company return with another collection of stunts, pranks, and candid-camera gags. The Jackass movies are in a class by themselves, but now that we have three (in addition to the short-lived MTV series), one can safely say that 3D is the least inspired. There are a few Keatonesque gems (an obstacle course of dangling stun guns and cattle prods, a game of tetherball with a beehive for the ball), but ingenuity mostly gives way to scatology (the “Poo Cocktail,” in which a portable toilet with a full load is launched into the air with someone inside)....

The Humans—good title. Perfect, in fact, for this cunning new play by Stephen Karam, inasmuch as his six characters are nothing if not. They gather for 90 minutes to do the most human things: Joke. Eat. Lie. Pray. Ail. Hope. Worry. Bicker. Nap. Monopolize the bathroom. Complain about the neighbors. Try to get a handle on their lives and fail. Their humanity trumps even the demands of conventional narrative; privileging behavior over drama, Karam waits until the last minute to deliver the sensational piece of information with which most other playwrights would start....

For all the great variety of Mexican food in Chicago, it’s just not much of a fish taco town. But during Lent—a time of year when multitudes of observant Catholics commit themselves to gustatory sacrifice and denial—crispy breaded pescadillos or tacos de pescado begin to appear all over the city on special Lenten, or Cuaresma, menus. This occurs even in fleshcentric taquerias and birrierias where the idea of a pescetarian meal seems about as appropriate as pork chops on Passover....

Flipping through the cartoons, charts, and oddball (if only very slightly disturbing) ruminations in Demetri Martin’s newest book, Point Your Face at This, isn’t unlike watching the comic’s stand-up. Martin often brings with him onstage a series of drawings scrawled out on a large pad of paper. With a blank, almost precious stare, he’ll narrate, for example, a sketch of three flagpoles: one with the flag at half-mast (“Someone died”), one with the flag perched at the top (“No one died”), and one with no flag at all (“Flagpole operator died”)....

thursday19 Thursday19 Tobias DeliusInternational Contemporary EnsemblePaul Lewis Friday20 AventuraDJ/Rupture & Matt ShadetekPaul Lewis Saturday21 A.A. BondyTobias DeliusJohn FogertyFuck ButtonsHalf RatsPaul LewisSaviours Sunday22 Tobias DeliusJump SmokersPaul LewisPine Leaf BoysSepteto Nacional Monday23 Tobias Delius Wednesday18 Baroness Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » PAUL LEWIS Between 2005 and 2007 young British pianist Paul Lewis performed all 32 of Beethoven’s piano sonatas on tour in Europe and the U....

Sandra Soss has cultivated her approach to decor since she was a child, but it was only four years ago that she learned the word for it—bricolage. Soss came across the term in a word-a-day calendar, defined as “something constructed by using whatever materials happen to be available.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Soss’s three-bedroom Lincoln Square apartment is jam-packed with curios recent and old, modern and country, industrial and handmade, culled over the years from thrift stores and rummage sales....

Punk rock is in a difficult spot right now: the precocious disaffected youth who have kept it running for nearly three decades are increasingly finding their creative outlets via samplers and cracked copies of Fruity Loops, not guitars, and all sorts of kids are starting to look at rock ‘n’ roll as their parents’ (or even grandparents’) music. The Vans Warped Tour, which has been the spiritual home of mall punk for almost two decades, has always presented itself as a gathering place for outsiders (especially people who can consider themselves outsiders even while they’re being directly marketed to by a large corporation), but it’s never been as far outside of mainstream pop culture as it is now....

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 » “My first day, I got lost, which was embarrassing. They gave me a run, and I was maybe a block away from it, but I ended up going the opposite direction, and I kept going for a while. They kept on calling me. I’m like, ‘I’m almost there!...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That was the scene early Thursday evening at Flatfile, where the hometown ensemble eighth blackbird was raising funds to launch a concert series at the Harris Theater. The gallery’s folding chairs were filled with musical patrons and curious food nerds like myself eager for a look at Molto Mario, but perhaps more anxious about the five-course dinner at Blackbird to follow (OK, I was anyway)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A couple of months ago the folks at Omnivore Records released Just Desserts: The Complete Waitresses, a comprehensive two-CD look at the early-80s new-wave band known almost exclusively for its freak 1982 Top 40 hit, “I Know What Boys Like.” I have fond feelings for the band’s “Christmas Wrapping,” one of the few good holiday rock songs, as well, and the Waitresses also wrote the theme for the short-lived, now cult sitcom Square Pegs....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A feeling of dread washes over me annually at this time, when the professional hazard known as the year-end list falls upon me. I have a tendency to take the task too seriously, and as November rolls around I try to cram in as many records that I haven’t heard yet as I can into my listening regime. Many of those records have been sitting on my shelves, waiting for some free time, but then I also go on the lookout for things I’ve missed....

There are two main ways to approach Record Store Day: You could celebrate like the devoted record geeks for whom the holiday was at least partly invented (and like the opportunistic eBay scum who have since latched onto it), gathering intelligence on which stores are stocking which exclusives and camping out in front of them for hours before their doors open. Or you could do what I do: cruise around, check out the most interesting-looking events, and see what stuff those stores have left after the rush....