Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Local emo singer-songwriter Evan Thomas Weiss has been recording and releasing music as Into It. Over It. for a little more than six years; for much of that time he’s been touring the country and select international locations with just a guitar and a growing catalog of earnest, enlivened tunes. About a year ago he started touring with a full band, allowing him to re-create the scuffed-up rawness of the loudest Into It....

Julie Brown is a candy freak—she eats some every day, graduating from childhood Gummi Bears to handmade marshmallow-stuffed caramels from Hammond’s Candies in Denver. Early this year she put that passion to work, combining her love of sweets with some marketing savvy to start up City Caramels, artisanal caramels in flavors she says are inspired by the city’s distinctive neighborhoods. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The coffee shops of Bucktown sparked a coffee-flavored caramel studded with bits of chocolate-covered espresso beans (though the label refers to the long-gone goatherds that gave the neighborhood its name)....

thursday20 Thursday20 Arbouretum, PontiakChicago Symphony OrchestraMohammad Reza Shajarian Friday21 Chicago Symphony OrchestraChainsaw DuPontSharon Jones & the Dap-KingsLudacris, Kesha Saturday22 Roberto CarlosChicago Symphony OrchestraChainsaw DuPontSwashbuckle Sunday23 Buzzcocks Monday24 Besnard LakesSix Tuesday25 Six Wednesday26 Koboku Senju CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA With passion, clarity, and intelligence, conductor Semyon Bychkov can make even the most complex and difficult music accessible. At 57, he holds posts with the Munich Philharmonic and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, and this year he won BBC Music Magazine‘s Disc of the Year award for a recording of Wagner’s Lohengrin....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Two days ago the Northwest Chicago Film Society screened Baby the Rain Must Fall (1965) at the Gene Siskel Film Center. It was a characteristic choice for the repertory programming organization in that the film provides a window into an overlooked chapter of American movie history—in this case, the career of director Robert Mulligan. Like such other NCFS favorites as Mitchell Leisen, John Cromwell, and André de Toth, Mulligan was a prolific, respected filmmaker in his lifetime but an overlooked one today....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A new memo from editor Gerould Kern to the Tribune staff: Dear fellow owners: We told you last week about The Guide (TV listings) moving from Sundays to Saturdays. Today I want to let you know about more changes in store for the Saturday paper. One of our 10 key initiatives for 2009 is to increase day-to-day profitability. Toward that goal, we are creating a new approach to the Saturday news experience for readers....

Last weekend I watched the classic 1954 film The Caine Mutiny, which sparked the question: Have there been mutinies aboard U.S. naval vessels, and if so, what were the outcomes? –Jeff P., via e-mail Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Navy ship but no formal charges. The ship was the brig Somers, discussed in this space before. In 1842 the Somers set sail on a training mission in the Atlantic with a large number of apprentice seamen....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » While the piglets have begun chowing on grass and weeds and even attacking the (organic) house slop (as Mark Kessenich’s attached photos demonstrate), they’re still weaning. They’re big enough now to suckle standing up while the sows are grazing, and they’ve become less discriminate, with Crystal’s piglets suckling Cherry and vice versa. One big happy family–but alas, it can’t last....

From Brakhage’s A Child’s Garden and the Serious Sea One of the most striking details in Monsters University is a student-made flyer that gets passed around throughout the story. The Pixar animators exquisitely re-create the look of Xeroxed text and Scotch tape—the creases in the paper seem real enough to touch. Like Jeff Koons with his stainless steel replicas of balloon animals, the Pixar team devote discernible effort (and, presumably, money) to the facsimile of a banal, disposable object....

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 » “I was adopted by a very nice couple. When I was a baby, they noticed I wasn’t responding to sounds, and they took me to Michael Reese Hospital. They fitted me with hearing aids in my left ear—my left ear was better than my right. My parents decided to send me to a regular school, and I grew up lip-reading....

When 61-year-old Pat Cummings recently moved to the new Town Hall Apartments—Chicago’s first LGBT-friendly affordable senior housing facility—she found solace in more than the cheap rent. Cummings has returned to Boystown, where she first lived when she came to Chicago more than three decades ago. Nationally, the population of elderly gay, lesbian and bisexual people will double from about 1.5 million in 2010 to three million by 2030, according to the LGBT group Services and Advocacy for GLBT Elders....

Power Pussy, Julia Haw It was me, a handful of Germans, a Dutch family, two Russians, and a large woman of indeterminate background breathing heavily on the back of my neck. We all stood there together, staring at the vagina. Actually, it was more like we were staring into the vagina, so lushly rendered was the anatomical detail. Some of the Dutch children tittered, the Russians muttered something that sounded vaguely approving, and the weight of the woman’s breath increased....

For years Yasunao Tone–a key member of Japan’s branch of the 60s Fluxus movement but a New York resident since 1972–had been looking for ways to keep his compositions unpredictable. In 1985 he struck gold: Long before the glitchwerks innovations of folks like Frank Bretschneider and Oval’s Markus Popp, he figured out how to override the hardware that translates binary information on CDs so he could play discs “wounded” with Scotch tape and straight pins....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sicko Mobb brothers Lil Ceno and Lil Trav are among a handful of west-side rappers creating a niche sound made specifically for the dance style known as bopping, and they’re doing a hell of a job at it; when I went to a Wala Cam War Zone dance battle in Austin a couple weeks ago, the duo’s intoxicating mix of high-pitched synth melodies and Auto-Tune-soaked vocals sent nearly every teen in sight into bopping frenzies....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I showed up to the Music Box Theatre’s late Saturday afternoon screening of A Touch of Sin a few minutes after the previews had started. The theater was nearly full, so I took a seat in the front row to avoid stepping over anyone. Sitting close to the screen proved a benefit—I doubt I would have been so affected by the movie’s violence if it weren’t right in my face....

Journalists have always told tales. Aspiring reporters wish to learn how to fashion truth into compelling narrative. But something’s happened. The industry’s shattering, the public is turning away from mainstream media, and today’s young journalists feel under intense pressure to become Scheherazades, to cling to their fickle audience by any means necessary because failure will cost them their lives. Medill’s home page is evidence of the disconnect. It now introduces the school in the kind of pretentious gibberish old-fashioned journalists despise: “ENGAGING the AUDIENCE with relevant, differentiated storytelling & messages....

Leor Galil Chance the Rapper I spent parts of Thursday popping ibuprofen like some rappers pop molly (or so their songs lead me to believe) so I could fight off a sudden illness in order to see a couple key Chicago hip-hop showcases: Fake Shore Drive curated one of Red Bull’s free outdoor shows, and later in the evening local rap label Lawless Inc. took over Club 119. Chicago’s hip-hop scene became the source of unexpected international interest last year largely thanks to the ascendance of teenage rap phenom Chief Keef, whose breakthrough mixtape, Back From the Dead, came out a year ago this past Tuesday....

©Coupleofdudes.com Parson’s Chicken and Fish On the corner of Armitage and Humboldt, the small brick building with the jaunty mansard roof has sat vacant for years. “This has always been one of those unlucky corners—since I was a kid, it’s been a muffler shop, a gyros place, a bakery, and they all failed,” said Alderman Rey Colon (35th). Sporting a brown fedora and neatly trimmed mustache, he surveyed the crowd packed inside for a private fund-raiser on Saturday night....

Cellist Erik Friedlander is an integral part of New York’s new-music community, where his ability to improvise and handle difficult arrangements has made him a valuable collaborator for folks like John Zorn, Dave Douglas, Sylvie Courvoisier, and Mark Feldman. He’s also played pop sessions with everyone from Joss Stone to the Mountain Goats. But on his forthcoming solo album Block Ice & Propane (Skipstone) he uses the cello to craft a distinctive brand of Americana–inspired, he’s said, by camper trips he took with his family as a child....

A few weeks ago I was at the L&L Tavern having drinks with a couple of coworkers and watching one of them discuss politics on Channel 11 (in a segment that had been taped earlier). After the show ended, the bartender came over to chat. “I love the Reader,” he said. “But that column where people cook with yak phlegm? That’s terrible. It’s gotta go. No one wants to cook with that shit....

A decade ago, on September 9, 1998, the YMCA building at 3763 S. Wabash became an official Chicago landmark. Completed in 1913, it gained an annex in 1945, and today it remains a hub of neighborhood activity. Stately on its quiet and well-kept Bronzeville block, it bears a plaque describing it as “an important center of community life” that offered housing and job training for “new arrivals from the South during the ‘Great Migration’ of African-Americans in the first decades of the 20th century....