As the holidays approach, I’d like to gather a little cheer to spread throughout the land, but so far my gift bag’s got nothing in it but a hole. About the only good thing I can say about that election is that we were spared a runoff, in which we would’ve had to choose between two candidates knocking each other over to explain how they love Mayor Daley while proposing to change most everything he did....

One of the first pieces you’ll encounter in “Binary Lore” is Edie Fake‘s LGBTIQUA, which consists of a word formed from eight pastel-toned octagons, each one containing a single letter. The octagons are staggered in a way that makes you want to recombine them. Read left to right, the letters spell the nonsensical QITAULBG, but if you mix the order up you’ll find words like LAB and QUIT; if you follow a zigzagging line, the word QUILTBAG emerges....

The Kennedy Expressway bends east to spare the imposing St. Stanislaus Kostka Church. St. Stanislaus returns the favor. Four years ago its pastor, Father Anthony Bus, decided the sanctuary should be open to the public around the clock. “It’s very uncommon,” says church secretary Cristina Carrazco. “I don’t think anyone else does it.” Last year the church launched a massive renovation of the sanctuary (designated by Cardinal Francis George as the Sanctuary of the Divine Mercy), making it unavailable during the workday....

If you’re looking to break it to the parents that you’ve been hiding an obscure body piercing that you got back in college, when you may or may not have been under the influence of some choice substances, you might as well do it with style, right? Scylla Jewelry crafts masterpieces to adorn whatever body parts you decided to poke a hole through, sober or not. Piercer and overall jewelry magician Micah Greenlay teamed up with Heather Garry of Corsetiere a few years ago to open a joint storefront on Ashland for Chicago custom corsets and jewelry....

Hoosier Mama Pie Company 1618½ W. Chicago 312-243-4846 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The other day I asked my wife: “What would be the best possible thing that could happen to our neighborhood on Sunday afternoons?” It was a leading question: I expected her to guess that Hoosier Mama had added Sunday hours (which it had: 10 AM to 4 PM). It’s not just any window seat: Haney’s shop is small, and the table, with its built-in pastel wooden benches and homey accessories, takes up the whole front of the space....

Mike Sula Caldo de res, Tio Luis Ever since the Trib boldly declared the tacos at Brighton Park’s Tio Luis the best in town six years ago, the compact but always packed neighborhood restaurant has been known for one thing. Apart from those and the occasional mention of its worthy carne en su jugo, there hasn’t been much published intel about the rest of the broad menu of antojitos, platillos, caldos, seafood, and breakfasts....

Chicago’s Intonation Music Workshop, a music-tutoring program for youngsters, knows rock ‘n’ roll is a circus and is admitting as much: on Saturday it hosts a Rock-N-Pop Circus at Lincoln Hall! It showcases six student bands—Six in the Mix, Neon Chicks, Scorps, Dangerous Rockstars, the Pop Tots, and Motsuk—and features plenty of other attractions for the kiddies, like rock-star face painting and a punk hairstyling booth. (This Wolf recommends a back-fur devil lock, if you’ve got the hair to pull it off....

Courtesy of Wayne Williams’s Facebook The Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events’ Wired Fridays might be my favorite unusual music series in the city. I say “unusual” because the electronic producers and DJs performing tend to play in the wee hours of the night, but for Wired Fridays they perform for tourists and folks scarfing down lunches on their breaks at noon in the Chicago Cultural Center. People come for the music, too: when I saw Traxman‘s Wired Fridays set last year I watched as handfuls of grade-school students tried their version of footworking alongside a few senior citizens while a small cluster of college-aged kids (one wearing a Dance Mania sweatshirt) stared at Traxman....

I’ve been interested in most anything Ike Reilly attaches his name to since I first heard his 2001 debut, Salesmen and Racists, an album that took the much-practiced and little-mastered tradition of rootsy songwriter rock and rendered it lupine and hungry again. On the new We Belong to the Staggering Evening (Rock Ridge), his third full-length with the Assassination, Reilly is again in great form, conjuring the hair-raising agoraphobic terror of the heartland’s wide-open spaces (the blues-noir instrumental “Bugsy Salcido Has Fled the Desert”) and tackling the unfair fairness of love and war with an affable cynicism (the angrily resigned “It’s Hard to Make Love to an American”)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There’s something about Katsuhito Ishii‘s The Taste of Tea (2004), running through March 8 at Facets, that makes describing it as a “comedy”–which just about everyone’s done so far: e.g., “a modern Japanese variation on ‘You Can’t Take It With You’” … not the half of it, amigos–seem utterly shortsighted and maybe even a little strange. Not that it isn’t funny, or at the very least absurdist, but some valedictory part of me insists that it be taken as possibly, just possibly, the last film we’ll ever see–or perhaps that’ll ever be made–that treats the earth as home, as a singular green haven that, at some phenomenological level, within the mesh of human artifacts (the built environment) and what’s usually known as “nature,” has essentially been “made” (interpret that as mythically/metaphorically as you choose) for us, as well as everything else in the biogenetic neighborhood....

“I have made an effort to get hold of the images in which the experience of the big city is precipitated in a child of the middle class. I believe it possible that a fate expressly theirs is held in reserve for such images. No customary forms await them yet. . . . But, then, the images of my metropolitan childhood perhaps are capable, at their core, of preforming later historical experience....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If there’s one short film in this program (which plays through Thursday at the Music Box Theatre) that benefits from being seen on a big screen, it’s Incident by a Bank, a 12-minute, single take re-creation of a failed 2006 robbery. Director Ruben Östlund sets his camera above a public square that’s across the street from where the incident takes place, suggesting an entomologist’s perspective on the action or certain films by Michael Haneke (e....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Introducing Silver to reporters in the White House briefing room, Obama noted that the data guru had called the winner in 49 states in the 2008 presidential election, and in all 50 states last year. “Nate’s our country’s best and brightest prognosticator,” the president said. “When Nate predicts something, you can take it to the bank. It’s time all America profits from this prophet....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Planned Parenthood is being sued for defamation by 17 people who say they’re members of the ad hoc Fox Valley Families Against Planned Parenthood, and by the Chicago-based Pro-Life Action League, founded by Joseph Scheidler in 1980. Scheidler’s son Eric, who lives in Aurora and spearheaded Fox Valley Families, is one of the 17 plaintiffs. This past Wednesday, Planned Parenthood filed a motion asking the Kane County circuit court to dismiss the lawsuit....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Federal appellate judge Richard Posner’s decision-making is way too conservative (as in unfair) for my taste, but he’s no wingnut. Consider this entry in the Becker/Posner Blog: “The global-warming skeptics are beginning to sound like the people who for so many years, in the face of compelling evidence, denied that cigarette smoking had serious adverse effects on health.” (Still in denial is Chicago’s own “belief tank,” the Heartland Institute....

Ever since the ramen revolution swept through town and every third working chef starting channeling Tampopo, I along with the other Pharisees have felt compelled to charge most of them with blasphemy. I’ve become so tired of repeating the assertion that a dilettante’s ramen can’t hope to compete with the lush, porky goodness of the tonkotsu ramen at the Santouka kiosk in Mitsuwa Marketplace—chain ramen, for chrissakes!—that I was afraid it would lose all meaning....

Gil Leora Urban American Gothic There’s a difference between tourists and travelers. Tourists skim the surface, lighting upon landmarks and attractions just long enough to snap a photo before moving on. For tourists—noses forever buried in maps, loudly bickering about the most efficient way to get from point A to point B—the meaning seems not to be the journey itself, but the collection of destinations, like notches carved into a bedpost....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s hard to dispute the fact that LA’s Stones Throw Records—currently celebrating its tenth anniversary—is one of the country’s best hip-hop labels. Although it still emphasizes the kind of stripped-down, no-frills hip-hop that people in some circles unfairly tag as “backpacker rap,” in recent years the label has truly expanded its sound, issuing albums from genre-bending soul singers like Aloe Blacc and Georgia Anne Muldrow and a number of killer compilations (both on Stones Throw and Now-Again, the distributed imprint of funk-45 collector Egon) highlighting hip-hop’s roots....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This is a lightly carbonated, strongly flavored, slightly salty water, beloved in the former Soviet Union. The waters that spring from the ground in the Borjomi Gorge in the Caucasus Mountains where it’s collected have been touted for their therapeutic qualities since the early 19th century. I can’t vouch for them, but Mineral Waters of World rates Borjomi 13th among hundreds of rated waters for bicarbonate levels, which means it’s good for indigestion and hangovers, and likely the reason it has bit of Alka-Seltzer bitterness on the back end....

Richard Gibbons is a Chicago architect and figurative painter obsessed with the sculptural form of the human body. Most of his work has been cool, nearly abstract, and devoid of narrative except for what the viewer might supply. But his current show, “Confession,” at Roy Boyd Gallery is a departure—a group of contemporary religious paintings, including three large triptychs, that give voice to a long-simmering struggle with the Roman Catholicism in which he was raised....