Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bikewise is a national site; it launched less than two weeks ago and so far has only really caught on in Seattle, where the founders are based. Chicago has only two points plotted so far–one crash and one hazard–but once it logs more reports it looks to be a useful tool for avoiding dangerous routes. It’s nice that the reports are detailed, so you can decide for yourself whether a crash involving a cyclist riding with no lights on a rainy night means the route’s unsafe or the theft of an unlocked bike means a neighborhood’s unsavory....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby’s A Wild Life is one of two Oscar contenders that were funded by the National Film Board of Canada (the other is Patrick Doyon’s Dimanche), which only goes to show that, for all the supposed evils of European-style socialism, it certainly has better cartoons. This hand-painted western story is distinguished by its handsome brushwork, which gives a tactile sense of the paint and a fair amount of expression to the simply drawn characters....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It would be easy to get sucked in by the curiosity factor of Andy Statman and just stop there. This New York Jew was born into a family of cantors back in 1945, and although he grew up singing Hasidic melodies as a teenager he got hooked on bluegrass via a Flatt & Scruggs album. His early education came from listening to a West Virginia radio station on shortwave, but eventually he met mandolinist David Grisman—the soon-to-be prog-bluegrass heavy who made that annoying Old and in the Way record with Jerry Garcia in 1975—who became his primary teacher....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Almost any article on Wilco is going to follow the “Jeff Tweedy: A Dude that’s Got Some Problems” formula to some extent, so I don’t mind that element of Greg Kot’s Wilco piece in the Tribune yesterday so much. He kept it mellow, didn’t make much of a big deal out of any of Tweedy’s issues, didn’t go too Barbara Walters on it....

THE BLOODLESS REVOLUTION: A CULTURAL HISTORY OF VEGETARIANISM FROM 1600 TO MODERN TIMES | Tristram Stuart (W.W. Norton) The young British scholar Tristram Stuart, on the other hand, gets more than halfway through The Bloodless Revolution, his study of the moral ascendancy of vegetarianism in the West, before any of the vegetarians under discussion bother to think about the lives of animals. Starting in the 17th century and ending with Hitler, he takes readers from a time when vegetarian sympathies were suspicious and closeted to our age, when people have been known to apologize for not being vegetarian (“I know, I know, but I just love bacon”)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Pascal Henry, 46, a Swiss motorbike courier, set out in May to eat in every Michelin three-starred restaurant in the world–68 restaurants in nine countries in 68 days. He had reached restaurant number 40: El Bulli on the Costa Brava, acclaimed as the finest restaurant on earth, when, after his dessert, but before paying his bill, he vanished....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The worst possible interpretation of the Palin pick is that the McCain campaign is old and thinks with its collective dick. I didn’t think that–initially she seemed plausible, for someone who didn’t know anything about her, not that I knew much more than the campaign–but then I read the NYT‘s interesting if not particularly shocking piece on why the McCain campaign is full of fail (not mentioned: the campaign is leaking like a sieve to the liberal media during the stretch run instead of campaigning):...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Great Lakes account for about 20 percent of the world’s surface freshwater and 84 percent of North America’s, and the region has extraordinary political clout this year, since it’s full of swing states that could determine the winner of the presidential race. This helps explain why Congress just passed the Great Lakes Compact, a major piece of legislation designed to guard the region’s ecosystems and increasingly coveted supplies of drinking water....

Try to think back to when Cirque du Soleil was new, if you can. Coming out of the 70s busking scene with its hippie values—itineracy, poverty, tribalism, artisanship, engagement, beauty, a healthy dose of Luddism—founder Guy Laliberté had created an outfit that looked like part of the general renaissance of small circuses, offering an alternative to the industrial spectacles epitomized by Ringling. His troupe played in a tent. There were no animals, no specialty acts to be pumped out one after another, and no stars as such—just an ensemble of marvelous artists whose skills served a larger narrative....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Australia is constantly throwing punk bands our way, and for some reason, they’re all really great. The latest outfit from down under hitting the States for a tour is the Melbourne-based (and unfortunately named) Cuntz, an unholy racket of a band that perfectly channels the bummer-punk of mid-80’s SST Records. The band is in town this weekend playing two shows—one at Permanent Records and one at a DIY loft in Logan Square—and they share both bills with some amazing locals....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If you were to rank Chicago’s restaurateurs by their desire to see their own faces in publicity, one end would be marked by the reclusive Brendan Sodikoff and the other by Billy Dec, star of Windy City Live!, wearer of hipster hats, online bro personality and, oh yeah, owner/personification of Rockit Ranch, which has the Rockit bars, Sunda, ¡Ay Chiwowa!...

The weather has been unbelievably bogus so far this so-called spring, so it’s hard to imagine we’ll soon be sweating our asses off while watching live music and eating funnel cakes together. But that nasty northeast wind notwithstanding, Chicago’s formidable summer-long lineup of outdoor music festivals will be upon us in no time. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Pitchfork Music Festival today announced the last couple of acts playing Union Park July 15-17, filling out a schedule that already included the likes of Animal Collective, Guided by Voices, TV on the Radio, and Odd Future....

Decibelle, the festival formerly known as Estrojam (which sounded like a lube for the postmenopausal if you ask this Wolf), has brought some ultimate X-chromosome throwdowns to our town. Past performers have included Cat Power, Gossip, and the last ever show by ESG—all big-name womynstrels! This year’s prime event is the Saturday-night blowout at Subterranean. The show, which also happens to be the official afterparty for the fest’s Margret Cho show (see Critic’s Choice in Performing Arts), will feature performances by New Orleans “sissy bounce” sensation Big Freedia (see the List) and Spanish garage rockers Capsula as well as a bevy of DJs....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tenor saxophonist Bill McHenry has been one of the most exciting, sophisticated players on the New York scene over the last decade, expertly squaring a more restrained and measured approach to improvisation and a curious, progressive sensibility. He made a series of excellent albums with the drummer Paul Motian—something of a model for McHenry, approachwise, despite their much different instruments; smart, melodic, and endlessly exploratory....

The Chef: Elissa Narow (Perennial Virant)The Challenger: Jeffrey Sills (Sprout)The Ingredient: Huitlacoche Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Nonetheless, Elissa Narow had trouble tracking it down. While she knew of a couple farmers who grow it, they were out. She’d resigned herself to using a canned version when one of the Perennial Virant cooks tracked down a farmer up in Wisconsin who had fresh huitlacoche and was willing to sell her several ears....

Now that even serious fans consider actually paying for their music optional, what other tactics might work to turn love into money? I wondered about this at length in last week’s column, “You Can’t Eat a Tweet.” But since then current events have provided an answer that hadn’t occurred to me: build up a devoted fan base, give them an Internet forum to play in, wait years until it evolves into a substantial online and offline community, and see if its members spontaneously decide to give you a huge pile of money....

Radio’s Future Prediction: Public Radio is gone in Chicago. Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not next week, but GONE GONE GONE nevertheless. The quest to reform low-power FM law actually is moving forward at a good clip this congressional session. The Local Community Radio Act passed the House Energy and Commerce Committee several weeks ago, and a full floor vote is anticipated in the next few weeks. In the Senate, the bill is expected to get a committee markup soon (although obviously health care is dominating everything on that side these days)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Not many days left for me at this site, so might as well go out in a blaze of fantasy indulgence. My next couple of posts (assuming there are any) will be almost purely narcissistic—”so how is that any different from usual, Pat?”: good point, smartass—just lists of films I like, minus any fabricated reasons … which, truth be known, are only the after-the-fact emissions of subliminal engines playing, like the nonverbal eureka!...

It’s a joy to watch a seemingly shallow play turn generous and important. Director Scott Shallenbarger treats the scenes in Terrence McNally’s 1994 play, about eight gay friends who spend three holiday weekends in a country home in upstate New York, like memories in the making. Time deepens everything: rather than delivering silly soap opera situations in a summer of loss and longing, Hubris Productions’ three-hour show offers a retrospective rich with the title qualities, especially undeserved compassion and conditional love....

When Nance Klehm sent letters to several dozen friends and acquaintances last year asking if they’d like to help compost their own excrement, she didn’t expect an enthusiastic reaction. And at first, she didn’t get one. “People are truly freaked out about this potty stuff,” she says. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Humble Pile is one of several efforts that the 43-year-old urban ecologist has launched in the past few years in an effort to help city dwellers reconnect with the natural world....