At the end of October, when the remnants of the devastating winds of Hurricane Sandy began churning the Great Lakes, a handful of men—a 45-year-old high school teacher, a 26-year-old engineering student, a 27-year-old union plumber, a 45-year-old concrete mason—suited up and made a beeline for the lakefront. Shrugging off weather warnings, they aimed to seize the opportunity provided by howling winds that would eventually beget 21-foot buoy readings in the middle of the lake and eight-foot surfable waves....

DIGITAL INCARNATE ARCADE GALLERY, COLUMBIA COLLEGE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Four collectives produced the five pieces in Digital Incarnate, capitalizing on their members’ expertise in computer science, drawing, sculpture, and film, as well as dance. All four manipulate and control the human form, generating sometimes Frankensteinian creations that, however abstracted or distorted, still reflect humanity. In Troika Ranch’s Liquid Mirror (2010) a camera records the viewer’s moving image, runs it through the real-time Isadora program (created by Mark Coniglio), and plants it in warped form on a triptych of screens....

Like a lot of Chicagoans, I wish Harold Washington could have been around to watch Barack Obama’s inauguration. Without Mayor Washington, there wouldn’t be a President Obama. Washington’s unlikely triumph in the 1983 mayoral race made him the first African-American to run this town, inspiring Obama to move here after he finished college, and changed the landscape for all the black politicians who came after. Thousands of white lifelong Democrats abandoned Washington and voted Republican in 1983 for fear that an independent-minded African-American would hire gangbangers to run the police department....

Patricia Robinson recalls a time when she fondly watched her son, Michael, then a toddler, sit in the windowsill of her Englewood home, completely engrossed. Matchbox car in hand, he would run the toy back and forth over the brown painted surface, making little vrooms and beep-beeps as he played. A recent study out of the University of Illinois at Chicago examined the blood lead levels of third graders between 2003 and 2006—students now likely to be roaming the halls at CPS high schools....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If there’s one life lesson that I’ve discovered that I would say is worth anything, it’s that following through on your dumbest, most unrealistic ideas can produce legitimately valuable experiences. I was actually thinking about this the other day when I decided to actually put some effort into one of the highly conceptual cover bands I’ve had floating around in my head for a while, like Hot Wings (the music of Paul McCartney & Wings in the style of ZZ Top), the Smashing Pupkins (a Smashing Pumpkins cover band with a singer who impersonates Robert De Niro’s character from The King of Comedy), or the as-yet-unnamed Lifter Puller cover band (where the conceptual punch line is that we practice very hard to sound just like Lifter Puller, but since very few people know what Lifter Puller sounded like no one would know)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » My eye was arrested by the title: “On the Modality of a Judgment About the Sublime in Nature.” To me, this rang of postgraduate pretension and desperation. Surely there’d been many a paper written on nature, and more than a few (plus an infinite number of bad poems) on the sublime in nature. And judgment on the sublime in nature had been frequently passed....

AP Photo/Matt Slocum Chris Sale retired all six batters he faced in last night’s All-Star Game and was credited with the win. Thanks to the American League’s 3-0 win over the National League in last night’s All-Star game in New York, the World Series will begin on the south side this October, unless the White Sox happen to be eliminated before then. The Cubs were denied home-field advantage in part by the pitching of gangly Sox southpaw Chris Sale, who got the win at Citi Field....

It’s always interesting to see two artists working independently of one another exhibited together. Done right, the juxtaposition can both enhance the viewer’s understanding of each artist as an individual and allow for the creation of new meaning in the interplay between their work. That’s the case with Vivian van Blerk and Douglas Stapleton’s joint show “In Metamorphosis,” which can be interpreted as an examination of narrative. Using ambrotype, an early photographic process that involves creating a positive image on a pane of glass, van Blerk captures characters from mythology in the moment their fate is sealed....

Yellowman was arguably the first legitimate superstar from the Jamaican dancehall scene—he broke out with the 1983 album Zungguzungguguzungguzeng—and his influence has been so extensive it’s hard to imagine what the music would sound like if he’d never existed. His 80s output bridged the previous decade’s roots-reggae sound and the electronics that would come to replace it, and his vivid lyrics—full of drugs, violence, and raunchy sex—established a template for the generations of gangsta-­minded “slack” vocalists who have followed in his wake....

Bill Hillman is founder and host of the Windy City Story Slam and a former Chicago Golden Gloves champ. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When I started high school I was a five-foot-nothing pud with slicked-back hair and a bad attitude. I became an immediate target for all the sadists amongst the juniors and seniors at St. Joe’s. There was this ritual of theirs called a locker check, which basically consisted of a towering meathead shoving his equally large friend into a freshman who was extracting or inserting books into a locker....

The Reader’s Choice: The Q Retail Wine Shop at Quartino Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Quartino’s wine shop is really more like a wine corner—an alcove next to the front door crammed with cases of a couple dozen Italian wines, many available only there. They can’t compete with Trader Joe’s on price—nor can most other small wine stores, for that matter—but many of their bottles are reasonably priced at around $10, and the shop boasts that Antica Osteria (available in bianco or rosso) is the best $5 wine available in America....

It was a dubious proposition from the start, the idea that African-Americans could unite behind a single black candidate to better their odds in the mayor’s race. Whites, meantime, weren’t coalescing at all—at least not openly. There were no public meetings about the need for whites to choose a single white candidate. And the early list of notable white mayoral wannabes was long: Sheriff Tom Dart, congressman Mike Quigley, Assessor Jim Houlihan, Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas, Cook County Commissioner Bridget Gainer, former city inspector general David Hoffman, and aldermen Brendan Reilly, Bob Fioretti, Scott Waguespack, Tom Tunney, and Ed Burke all considered running....

Danny Davis is late and no one can find him. “It’s going straight to voice mail,” his scheduler says as she hangs up the phone after her latest attempt. This is not good news. A half dozen people have been waiting in his west-side congressional office for half an hour. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As it happens, the reason I’m here is to talk with the congressman about ex-offenders....

Q: I’m a straight male, 21 years old. I love women, I’ve always loved women, I’ve always loved having sex with women. However, in the last year, here and there, I’ve jerked off to transsexual porn. One night, after drinking with a friend and smoking some hash, I arranged a date with a trans sex worker. She was totally womanly, nothing manly about her, except for, you know. She licked my butt, gave me head, and fingered me....

Trust Lookingglass Theatre Company Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » David Schwimmer and Andy Bellin adapted the script from a screenplay by Bellin and Rob Festinger. According to the program, Schwimmer has shot the film and is finishing it up now; he codirects this stage version with Heidi Stillman. The play bears telltale signs of its cinematic origins: a lot of 30-second scenes, multiple location changes, banal dialogue modeled on everyday speech....

What’s it all mean? You’ve had moments like that, right? You’re pondering something—say an idea, a career, your place in the universe, or a new restaurant from a well-known, likable chef—and you think to yourself, “What possible difference can this make to the health of the planet and the salvation of the human race?” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It means, for now, that if you show up at 9:15 AM on a weekday, you might have the place to yourself to spread out in a booth with laptop or whittling log and sip away on black gold La Colombe coffee while you contemplate the existential meaning of the restaurant’s turkey-cheddar-broccoli crepe....

Brazilian singer and composer Marcos Valle began making music in the early 60s, and since the 90s he’s been settled into a comfortable groove, apparently disinterested in developing his art or rocking the boat. He sticks to the same kind of slick, jazzy bossa nova that other musicians were already playing the late 70s; he makes the occasional album, most often for British label Far Out; and he tours, usually in Europe....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Turns out the only things you can customize in your profile are your username and the color of your box. This has a double advantage. It’s a real time saver, considering how other networks practically ask you to compile an autobiography for your profile. And it imparts a soothing, Zenlike simplicity to the user experience–all you can do on Muxtape is listen to mix tapes and make mix tapes, nothing more....

Chicago doom-metal band Lord is getting into the movie business, sort of. “Rise Into the Stars,” an epic cut from the group’s 2011 self-titled debut, will appear on the soundtrack to Chicago Rot, a locally produced indie horror flick that’s in the works. Plus Lord has also licensed six songs to 2010 U.S. Pole Dance Federation champion Alethea Austin for use in two of her instructional DVDs, Alethea Austin’s Floorwork and Alethea Austin’s Sexy Fundamentals....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sometimes they get seeds for these unusual plants from refugee communities in other cities. Other times they buy them in Vietnamese groceries around Argyle and replant the stems in their plots. That’s how the story goes with what the Burmese call chin baung ywet, known in English as roselle, a variety of hibiscus that nearly every Burmese-tended plot in the garden seems to be carpeted with....