Every Halloween musicians don Kiss makeup or torture their hair into Misfits devil locks, and all year round a herd of mersh cover bands plays the hits of the 70s, 80s, and 90s to cash in on the Lincoln Park/Wrigleyville knucklehead circuit. But it’s something else altogether to cover a band as fearlessly inventive as the Minutemen—reigning champeens of musical thunderspiels, hailing from San Pedro, California. Charity is all well and good, but Econoline have another hurdle to clear: they’ve got to satisfy die-hard Minutemen obsessives like me, for whom Double Nickels on the Dime exists in a sacrosanct musical space shared only by A Love Supreme and Trout Mask Replica....

Two of the supporting characters in Tony Fiorentino’s new play for Diamante Productions are easy to relate to: a man overburdened by the nonstop demands of his brother, Joel, after an accident, and Joel’s fiancee, struggling to remain connected to him as he tries to push her away. But the work’s center is Joel, an obsessive struggling actor, played by Andrew Pond as an unremitting ass. Embittered by becoming a paraplegic, Joel flirts with suicide and antagonizes his therapist when he isn’t enacting petty revenge on the brother he blames for his car crash....

Rahm Emanuel’s interest in marijuana seemed to come out of nowhere. In truth, it was months in the making. These arrests burden local courts, resulting in punishments meted out so capriciously that armed dealers are sometimes let off with little more than a slap on the wrist while casual users are locked up for possessing a dime bag. And though about 90 percent of these arrests are effectively thrown out in court, they cost county taxpayers at least $78 million and tens of thousands of police hours a year....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Milwaukee is planning on building a statue of the Fonz, which has local artists in a fuss. Dave Steele at Next American City has a pointed critique, but it’s flawed. He says that it would honor “the Coolest Person Ever, far cooler than the Bob Newhart statue in Chicago or the Mary Tyler Moore statue in Minneapolis.” This is clearly not true, Bob Newhart is cooler than the Fonz and history will judge me correct on this....

Lee Sandlin‘s new book will read familiar to those of us who grew up in the company of a reliable midwestern archetype: the taciturn, emotionally remote grandparent. Here there’s a quartet not of Sandlin’s actual grandparents but his great uncles and aunts, two of each, and they live together in a house in Edwardsville, Illinois, where Sandlin (Wicked River, Storm Kings) visits them as a child. Originally published as a 12-part series in the Reader, and since revised and expanded, The Distancers pieces together a short history of the Sehnert family—Sandlin’s mother’s side—focusing mainly on these four: two sisters, Helen and Hilda, and their brother Eugene; and Hilda’s unlikable husband, Marty, who endlessly needles his fellow diners at Sunday supper....

The Chef: Ian Rossman (Frog N Snail)The Challenger: Dave Ford (the Bluebird)The Ingredient: Cattails Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » While almost all the parts of the cattail plant are edible in certain seasons, Rossman was challenged specifically with the flower spike, the immature corn-dog-shaped seed head for which the plant is named. The young shoots, also known as “Cossack asparagus,” can be peeled and eaten raw, steamed, or sauteed....

Crowded into a performing space smaller than many living rooms, John Mossman’s pressure-cooker production is well suited to John Guare’s eccentric, overheated drama about a Maine housewife turned Times Square porn star accused of killing her son. Filled with intense performances and executed at a pace that unifies Guare’s intentionally jagged storytelling, this staging reveals the pockets of brilliance in his sometimes inspired, sometimes just self-indulgent 1977 play. Mossman’s pitch-perfect cast easily negotiates the story’s many mood shifts–from dark to light, grotesque to silly, nihilistic to mildly sentimental....

Coal and Condos I’d rather live by an old coal plant than a condo development. —manuki Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » @elegantmint—Did you ever consider that the asthma could be caused by other (documented) sources such as dust from your new home—which is probably within an older building or from traffic in this congested area (including the constantly jammed Dan Ryan and Stevenson)? It’s so easy to blame the power plants for everyone’s ills, but also not intellectually honest....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last month the local-news Web site Pasadena Now hired two reporters based in India to cover the “city government and political scene” in Pasadena, California. The site’s proprietor explained to the Associated Press that since most information can easily be gathered long-distance (especially now that Pasadena city council meetings are viewable online), outsourcing was a reasonable and cost-effective way to improve the site’s reportage....

Richard A. Chapman / Sun-Times Mayor Rahm Emanuel surrounded himself with a rainbow coalition of children to announce his reelection bid. Mayor Rahm Emanuel wants voters to know the story of how he took office and began transforming Chicago from a decaying pit of corruption into a capital of opportunity that leaves no one behind, inspiring a rainbow coalition of children to come together and cheer—literally. Emanuel noted that Cinespace was an abandoned factory not long ago but is now where Chicago Fire, Chicago PD, and other shows and movies are made....

As always, your Reader Rater Favorite Restaurants [“Your Top 50,” March 9] demonstrates the shortcomings of a system which pretends that the ability to enter a restaurant qualifies a person to offer an informed opinion regarding what happened there. It’s certainly true that nobody stays on top forever, and no doubt Grant Achatz is truly a genius exercising his talents not only in cuisine but in gadget-laden presentation as well. Still, it is hard to believe that, were Charlie Trotter to be included in this list (his omission was an oversight, wasn’t it?...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jackson was the restoration project manager for the place, working with Chicago’s Wilbert Hasbrouck. Now Jackson is on a more abstract kick, pointing out that the powerful tool for greening architecture, the LEED [Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design] rating system of the U.S. Green Building Council, may not take into proper account how environmentally constructive restoring old buildings can be....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Born John Stillman (his father was a Hollywood film producer, his mother a dancer in Busby Berkeley musicals), Wrangler began his career as a child actor, then majored in theater here at Northwestern University. Starting in 1970, he spent about 15 years appearing in adult films aimed at both gay and straight audiences, while also occasionally working on the off-Broadway stage....

Q I’m writing to you under the influence of a little alcohol, as I’m not sure I’d have the courage to write to you about this sober. I’ve got an awkward situation. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » OK: Dad’s an abusive asshole and borderline psycho, and Mom’s a beautiful woman with a lot of opportunities and social skills. The only reason she didn’t leave him was to keep the family together and for those same stupid cultural reasons....

For an hour and a half yesterday at Trinity United Church of Christ on the far south side, five mayoral candidates civilly discussed the issues in the race, aiming most of their barbs at the opponent who hadn’t shown, Rahm Emanuel. The candidates were seated at a table in front of the lectern, with the moderator of the forum, ABC-TV reporter Charles Thomas, off to one side. Members of the all-African-American audience had submitted questions on index cards, which Thomas put to the candidates....

The Raven, a highly enjoyable piece of gothic hokum, purports to reveal the truth about Edgar Allan Poe’s last days, but it begins with a statement that’s patently false. After a mysterious disappearance, the opening title informs us, Poe was found delirious on a park bench in Baltimore on October 7, 1849. Director James McTeigue fades in on a close-up of the title bird, perched on a tree branch above the ailing Poe (John Cusack), and the eerie image is typical of a movie that favors macabre atmosphere over established fact (or even common sense)....

Farewell to Dejla: Stories of Iraqi Jews at Home and in Exile Tova Murad Sadka (Academy Chicago Publishers) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tova Murad Sadka, who grew up in Baghdad, joined this exodus, moving first to Israel and later to the U.S., where she lives now. In Farewell to Dejla, she uses the short story to explore the travails of Iraqi Jews, both in their homeland and in dispersion....

Late last year Billboard magazine revamped its genre-specific charts (Hot Country Songs, Rap Songs, Hot Rock Songs) by applying the same Internet-friendly methods for determining a song’s popularity that it had been using for its Hot 100 and On-Demand Songs charts since March: the data used in rankings was expanded to include digital streams or downloads alongside radio plays or record sales. It was a timely if not overdue move from the curators of the charts that set the industry standard for judging a record’s success—traditional metrics haven’t accurately reflected real-world music consumption for a while, and right now YouTube views are just as important as spins on terrestrial radio....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Yes, I listen to any and everything released by Kurt Ballou’s GodCity Studio. I have my reasons: the first and foremost being that the Converge guitarist rarely releases an album that isn’t thick and crushing (he deals quite a bit in Southern Lord’s catalog). It’s his gift to the world. To keep track of releases that he engineered and took through his soundboard, I simply keep an eye on his Facebook page....

About 20 years ago Jack Clark fashioned a noir novel out of a string of vignettes drawn from his night job as a Chicago cabbie. Having failed to find a publisher for it, he tried to get it serialized in the Reader. When the Reader took a pass, Clark self-published 500 copies under the title Relita’s Angel and began distributing them from his taxi. For the next year or so, he carried a stack of the paperbacks in his cab, unloading them at $5 each—$3....