Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In an event uniquely suited to Free Shit, local gardener, artist, landscape designer, and food activist Nance Klehm presents “Humble Pile,” an overview of her months-long nutrient looping experiment, tonight from 7 to 9 at Mess Hall in Rogers Park. Nutrient looping means composting one’s urine and feces with a dry toilet (in Klehm’s case, basically a bucket and some sawdust), as opposed to flushing it, which not only wastes the nutrients in your waste but gallons of water to boot....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One was called “King Size Cigarette,” a fantastic, ultracatchy garage tune by a band from Des Moines, Iowa, called the Law, reputedly the state’s first punk act. It’d been released as a single in 1980, but WPRB had transferred it to a cart–a bulky cartridge containing a tape loop, usually used for commercials or public service announcements (I know this because I eventually got to DJ on the station one evening in 1986)....

We’ve heard this argument many times before. “I understand there may be a few bad apples in the bushel, but there are gangbangers and drug dealers in the neighborhoods who learn how to file complaints against officers,” the 47th Ward’s Eugene Schulter said in a hearing just last week that gave alderman an opportunity to tee off on the Independent Police Review Authority, the agency charged with vetting complaints about cops....

The Book of Eli Directed by Albert and Allen HughesWritten by Gary Whitta This is why you should believe me when I tell you to ignore the critics who are dumping on the zippy new postapocalyptic romp The Book of Eli (showtimes), which as I write is polling a scandalously low 46 percent at the review-aggregating Web site Rotten Tomatoes. That advice goes triple for critics applying adjectives like pompous, portentous, solemn, or preachy to this psychotronic little drive-in gem....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Another year, another list, though once again I’ve opted for the general-purpose “favorite films” and shied away from “best.” Just another hobbyhorse of mine, arguably, except theoretically it’s possible for someone to compile a list of allegedly best films without actually, well, liking—and you can construct that whatever way you choose—any of them. No necessary overlap there, which is something to be avoided at all costs … since if personal whimsicality isn’t the better part what these annual indulgences are for (as opposed to rankings pretending to oracular “objectivity,” an impersonal divining on history’s behalf), then why should we even bother?...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Irving Park Community Food Pantry hosts the 23rd annual Hunger Walk, which benefits food pantries, soup kitchens, and shelters that are member agencies of the Greater Chicago Food Depository, Saturday at 9:30 AM (registration begins at 8 AM). Walkers leave from Montrose Harbor for a five-kilometer stroll along the lakefront; they’re encouraged to collect at least $50 each in donations....

The pinnacle of last week’s Take Back Chicago rally at UIC came near the end, when the 11 aldermen onstage were asked point-blank whether they support pending proposals to slow privatization and tax increment financing deals. Yes or no? I don’t think he was trying to be funny, but I laughed anyway. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But getting an alderman to sign on as cosponsor of legislation that he or she knows will die in the City Council’s rules committee is not a victory....

Soon all the names will run out. This is for worse and for better. It seems to have authorized lesser watering holes to charge Violet Hour prices for what’s often pomegranate swill. On the other hand, it’s created a bona fide market, in which both bartenders and drinkers can pursue their own interests: gin at Scofflaw, complicated glassware at the Aviary, tiki drinks at Paul McGee’s forthcoming Three Dots and a Dash....

“The struggle to save Jean Klock Park from development is an issue of moral values. The park was a gift for ‘the children of future generations forever’ “ xopher Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last fall in a petition drive to ask the governor of Michigan to withdraw support for taking the public park, roughly seven out of ten people in both the “twin cities” were willing to sign and did so....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The White Sox and Cubs both find themselves down 0-2 in their first-round baseball playoff series, but I’m not giving up on either. Both teams have excellent pitchers slated to start the rest of the way. The Sox will throw Gavin Floyd and, should he win, John Danks at the Tampa Bay Rays here at Sox Park. If both pitch the way they did earlier in the week in must-win games against the Detroit Tigers and Minnesota Twins, and the Sox’ hitters respond to returning home, they could easily even the series and send it back to Florida for the finale, no doubt with Mark Buehrle on the mound....

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....

Sweet Bird of Youth The Artistic Home mounted a beautiful production of Sweet Bird of Youth just two years ago. But as Obie Award-winning director David Cromer notes, “Great art is different every time.” An idiosyncratic risk taker with a knack for revealing new facets of well-known scripts, Cromer is making his directorial debut at the Goodman Theatre this fall with that same Sweet Bird—Tennessee Williams’s 1959 drama about an over-the-hill actress shacked up with an aging gigolo in a Palm Beach hotel....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That’s just a thought — a thought I might have had for the first time in 2002, at the memorial service for Tom Fitzpatrick. Fitz in his day was one of the top people — a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Sun-Times. The memorial service didn’t do only him justice — it was a celebration of the generation he’d just departed and one of the funniest, sweetest 90-odd minutes of my life....

“How do you get a guy to be a geek?” marvels Tyrone Power as a recently hired carnival magician to his thuggish boss in 1947 cult noir Nightmare Alley, screening this week in 35-millimeter as part of the Music Box’s Noir City series. “I mean, is a guy born that way?” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In broad outline, the film is faithful to its source....

Gwennatta Davis left the Conservative Vice Lords long before she went to prison, but her gang tattoos got her beaten up there anyway. She was 15 when she got them: a five-point star and the letters CVL on her upper left arm, part of her initiation into the gang, which had operated near her home in North Lawndale since the 60s. At first, she says, “it was just fun hanging around them....

The eight Halloween shows reviewed here represent a mere fraction of the current offerings in a seasonal subgenre that’s become as ubiquitous as Nutcrackers in December. So consider this a sampler, with selections ranging from family-appropriate (The Legend of Sleepy Hollow: A New Folk Musical) to more suitable for frat boys (Nightmares on Lincoln Avenue). More can be found in our listings. —Tony Adler Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Regardless of the outcome of this Tuesday’s election, remember that either candidate has a daunting list of obstacles ahead. Here’s a few: poverty, overcrowded prisons, a continued presence in Afghanistan, a mostly unregulated financial industry, an ominous potential crisis in the Middle East, possibly three new Supreme Court justices, increasing storms and climate-related catastrophes that may or may not be the product of global warming, and a housing crisis that’s only now beginning to end....

Philip Glass’s The Fall of the House of Usher, opening February 23 at Chicago Opera Theater, is a turning point for the company. This marks the real end of the era of now-retired general director Brian Dickie, who raised COT’s artistic profile and moved it to Millennium Park. And it’s the first full season for his successor, Andreas Mitisek, the new guy in town. Meanwhile, COT was struggling after several years of declining revenue and climbing debt....

California Dreamin’ For this week’s long review, Ben Sachs wrote about the new Michael Bay film, Pain & Gain, noting the way it “argues that the American dream of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness has been perverted to justify literally anything that will help you accrue privilege and material wealth and lord them over everyone else.” I’ve yet to see the film myself, but Bay’s cynical view of the American dream strikes me as curious....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s great that last week the Baseball Writers Association of America finally woke up — enough, anyway — and voted Rich “Goose” Gossage into the Hall of Fame. Gossage was the most fearsome reliever of his time, with a rear-back-and-heave-it windup distinguished by an elegant little flick of the glove on his left hand toward home plate. (Jim Palmer had a similar small gesture, in the midst of a much more methodical delivery....