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Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There are a lot of great garage bands that have helped make the scene in Australia one of the most vibrant in the world, and out of all of them Sydney’s Royal Headache is my favorite; the four-piece plays a catchy blend of garage, soul, and power-pop, which made for a hell of a self-titled debut album. Late last week the group dropped a two-song single on Bandcamp called “Stand and Stare” b/w “Give it All to Me,” and I’m quite fond of the B side cut, which is today’s 12 O’Clock Track....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Although Mark Brown’s column in the Sun-Times Tuesday was for the most part insightful (“You always can tell when somebody in politics is starting to be taken seriously; you start hearing rumors about their sex life.”), I’m not sure Eliot Spitzer would find it entirely fair. Brown’s topic was the secret sex lives of the high and mighty in government, and he made the point that “one of the reasons there are a lot of rumors about politicians fooling around is that a lot of politicians fool around....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A couple of weeks ago I wrote about an event this weekend called A John Cage Festival, a four-concert program curated by Chicago composer Nomi Epstein. Cage might be the most famous experimental composer of the 20th century, but his philosophy and personality are far better known than his actual music. As Epstein said in my piece, “In America his works are often presented briefly on the day in class that graphic scores and 4’33” are discussed....

Earlier this year the University of Chicago Press reissued Mike Royko’s first book, a 1967 collection of pieces he’d written for the Chicago Daily News since it made him a columnist in ’63. Back then the title was Up Against It. The new edition is called Early Royko: Up Against It in Chicago, and the name change gave David Royko a problem. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In one important respect it turned out to be better than a discharge....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Joel Achenbach and Ashley Surdin: “A political establishment held in higher regard might have been able to hold together some kind of coalition of the willing…. Members of Congress in both liberal and conservative districts were inundated with e-mails and phone calls from angry voters opposing the bailout. With Election Day a little more than a month away, many lawmakers appeared to pay greater heed to their constituents than to their party leaders....

Blackbird’s New Magician Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After a little more than six months, Sheerin, a 31-year-old who grew up on the north side of Chicago, has subtly and smartly put his mark on the restaurant. He’s preserved the identity of Blackbird–fresh and ingredient-focused food–but his cooking snaps with unexpected ideas. “I get playful,” says Sheerin, who’s soft-spoken with a vaguely bashful look....

“Think about it: after September 11th, if there was a call from the president to get us off foreign oil to stop funding the very terrorists who had just attacked us, every American would have said, ‘how can I do my part?’ This administration failed to believe in what we can achieve as a nation, when all of us work together.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Oh, shit, Keith Olbermann just brutalized McCain....

I lost track of Incognito when the Rams dropped him in 2009. I’m from Saint Louis so I followed the Rams. Earlier he’d played for Nebraska, and my wife went there so I followed the Huskers too. Incognito signed with Nebraska in 2001 out of Glendale, Arizona, because, he said, “Nebraska is the best lineman school in the country,” and it looked for a while that he’d be the latest in a long line of Husker All-Americas in the trenches....

On the Street Doing Life is a book about an enigma written by an enigma. Anne Keegan doesn’t bore her readers trying to explain Mike Cronin, who wasn’t a typical cop, and I don’t pretend to know what pushes Keegan’s buttons. A monk sworn to a life of silence toots his horn better than Keegan toots hers. We’ve known each other more than 30 years, and her refusal to promote herself falls somewhere between a virtue and a phobia....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Fifteen-year-old Alma (Helene Bergsholm) is so desperately horny she distracts herself from her dull cashier’s job by rocking back and forth on a roll of coins, her reverie interrupted only when she’s startled by a little girl buying candy. The scene perfectly encapsulates the charm of this 2011 Norwegian comedy: it’s sweetly innocent but also frankly sexual, perched at the precise moment when boys stop being gross and start becoming a thing of joy, wonder, and frustration....

Treated Crew isn’t just a rap group. People in the crew just so happen to rap and Treated is our brand. The music is like the campaign; it’s the theme music. You gotta have people believe in your campaign. With Treated Crew it’s dope because we got to see so much stuff as consumers—and now we are the producers, so we get to do it exactly how we want to....

Six years ago, when Robin Monique Rios opened the 4Art Inc gallery in a large, glassy, two-story space at 1932 S. Halsted in east Pilsen, her landlord welcomed her as exactly the right kind of tenant for the neighborhood he’d newly dubbed the Chicago Arts District. John Podmajersky III—whose family had lived in east Pilsen since 1914, and whose parents began buying property and creating an artists’ community there a half century ago—was looking for what he called “artist-entrepreneurs” to replace the street-level studios along Halsted from about 16th to Canalport with galleries and art-related businesses....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tuesday in court, assistant U.S. attorney Eric Sussman did. And in answering Sussman Radler incriminated himself — which he’d done already when he pleaded guilty to fraud. We’ll find out when the trial ends if he also successfully incriminated Conrad Black. He talked about a “template” that “Toronto” decreed would govern the sale of Hollinger International properties: 25 percent of all noncompete fees would be kicked upstairs to Hollinger Inc....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » From the PR: “Music is a source of entertainment and personal inspiration, but can also carry a great deal of influential power in politics and national identity. From hip-hop artists in Africa and Iran to the Muslim punk movement ‘Taqwacore’ to the rock songs and ballads that inspired supporters of Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, music has shown it can unite people in order to incite change....

Tracy Ullman got a call in June 2008 from her best friend’s mother, who lives in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. “She said, ‘It’s raining horribly out here—you should come out and make a documentary,’” says Ullman, a Chicagoan and documentary film producer. But her view of the city evolved during the eight months she was shooting City Under Water. “I admired how these people banded together and would never accept defeat,” she says....

FUNNY GAMES • WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY MICHAEL HANEKE WITH NAOMI WATTS, TIM ROTH, MICHAEL PITT, BRADY CORBETT, AND DEVON GEARHART Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Other directors have remade their own films later in life, including Leo McCarey (Love Affair as An Affair to Remember), Frank Capra (Lady for a Day as A Pocketful of Miracles), Tod Browning (London After Midnight as Mark of the Vampire), and Yasujiro Ozu (A Story of Floating Weeds as Floating Weeds)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Local jazz bass mainstay Tatsu Aoki screens a 25-minute selection from his work-in-progress documentary Origins of Now: Stories of the Chicago Nisei, a companion to his composition Rooted: Origins of Now, Sunday as part of The 14th Annual Asian American Showcase. Aoki traces Chicago’s Japanese American community, from World War II internment camps, resettlement and generations of quiet assimilation, to contemporary cultural rediscovery....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s puzzling that during these do-nothing days while the Conrad Black jury is out more of the visiting Canadian and British press corps isn’t ducking into the “Family Secrets” trial. I mean, you’re in Chicago already, seize the day! “Family Secrets” involves the Chicago mob, spiritually descended from Capone, in all its rancid glory, and how can any reporter who wallows in cultural cliche resist?...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In other words, it’s time for Stroger to make like former south side congressman Ralph Metcalfe and break from the Daley machine. I know this won’t be easy for Stroger. The Strogers–father and son–have been loyal to the Daleys–father and son–for years and years and years. Back in 1983, John Stroger endorsed Mayor Daley over Harold Washington at great peril to his political career–a fact that the mayor has apparently forgotten....

In the early 1900s white and black Chicagoans often lived side by side. But as blacks began flowing into the city in larger numbers during World War I, whites set about protecting their neighborhoods from racial integration. Often they relied on informal means, such as dynamite. But they also used the law. By the late 1920s almost all white neighborhoods were subject to “restrictive covenants” that banned black residents, though house servants, janitors, and chauffeurs were charitably allowed to live in their employers’ basements or garages....