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During election season Chicago aldermen tend to be quicker to anger, especially when an issue has the potential to play big in their wards. During the February 7 City Council meeting various aldermen expressed outrage over, among other things, poorly run dog kennels, parking-meter rates in neighborhood shopping districts, and lax regulation of massage parlors. Then there was a resolution urging the city to do more to honor its founder, Jean Baptiste Point DuSable, a black Haitian-American....

The idea here is to cut out the middleman. The bulk of this Fall Books issue consists of excerpts from new works by locals, pure and unadulterated. You can check out a passage from Adam Levin’s hot new novel, The Instructions, before making the commitment to lug its 1,030 pages home with you. Sometime Reader contributor Lee Sandlin offers a piece of his just-published Wicked River, in which he applies his rhapsodic writing style to the history and lore of the Mississippi before the engineers had their way with it....

This time a year ago, Toni Preckwinkle was one of 50 aldermen, and her sphere was the Fourth Ward and its more than 50,000 residents. Now, as Cook County Board president, she directs a government with a $3 billion budget in a sprawling area home to 5.2 million—the nation’s second-most-populous county after Los Angeles County. In the waning days of the Stroger administration, his deputy chief of staff, Carla Oglesby, was indicted on charges that she funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars in county contracts to companies owned by her or her associates....

About a month ago I called on the citizens of Chicago to revolt against our screwed-up tax system by filing lawsuits—but I never dreamed it would happen this way. On August 20, in the midst of the fuss state senator James Meeks has raised about the spending gap in education funding, the Chicago Urban League filed suit against the state, seeking to overturn our system of financing public education. Represented by legal powerhouse Jenner & Block, the league has been egged on by none other than Mayor Daley—the irony of which I’ll get to in a bit....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I spent grade 13 at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where I tried to finesse my freshman science requirement by taking a class in horticulture. Not that I had any reason to think I’d do well at it. I grew up in an apartment, the child of people whose idea of communing with nature was pulling the cellophane off a head of lettuce....

If there’s such a thing as art-house improv, this is it. With their quasi-mystical “Japanese” aesthetic, minimalist pacing and blocking, and character-driven humor, the expert Promise Keepers mold the paradigmatic Harold to their sophisticated sensibilities. Adroitly accessing standard techniques when needed, the four improvisers introduce exciting moments, like a fistfight, but succinctly downplay them for dry comic effect. Conversely, ordinary events, such as a family sitting around talking, assume amusing dramatic potential....

Loaded with catchy tunes and catchier ideas, this documentary profiles the fearless feminist rocker Kathleen Hanna, who swam against the current of 90s punk machismo with her Washington-state band Bikini Kill and her influential fanzine Riot Grrrl. Director Sini Anderson draws on numerous archival interviews with Hanna as well as her own, and the singer is articulate and introspective enough to counter all the adoring comments from her bandmates and musical colleagues (Joan Jett, Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, Corin Tucker of Sleater-Kinney)....

Chances are you’ve already read five to several recaps of last night’s Mad Men season premiere, scene-by-scene deconstructionist analyses that we can imagine simultaneously make Matthew Weiner die a little inside and nudge him toward self-satisfied sexual climax. That’s not my bag. Like the Zippo said, see. Here’s a not-at-all comprehensive smattering (so a smattery smattering) of observations, questions, and general concerns: Don. Hey. Don is so good at the silent treatment, even when he’s inflicting it on the audience....

The Polls Are In Maybe the Trib will endorse … no one. —The_Little_Pig Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Little Pig—the Trib declined to endorse when Braun ran against Williamson for the U.S. Senate in ’92. The editorial, as I recall, was disdainful of both candidates. I can’t see it being similarly disdainful of both McCain and Obama. Even if it were, it’d still pick McCain....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Which means, I guess, that the layoff on February 20 of marketing director Tony Barnett was significant only to Barnett. “I’m still reeling from it,” he told me Friday. He’d been at TOC since it was launched in 2004. “I think they’re cutting back to a lean mean machine,” said Barnett. “I think obviously expectations aren’t being met.”...

“The Strange Survival of Ink” was the headline to a recent Economist article marveling that somehow, some way, “almost all newspapers have survived.” This despite the recession, despite falling circulation, despite advertising revenues that according to the Newspaper Association of America have dropped 35 percent since early 2008. “For the most part,” said the Economist, “newspapers have cut their way out of crisis,” laying off staff, closing bureaus, combining operations. Then there’s newsprint, a huge expense that newspapers have slashed by as much as 40 percent by “using less of the stuff, printing fewer words on smaller, thinner pages....

Fear front man Lee Ving In the past decade there’s been a mind-blowing amount of work done toward the goal of getting every piece of pop-cultural ephemera ever produced documented, uploaded to the Internet, and commented on (either nostalgically or snarkily) by hundreds or thousands of anonymous strangers, but obsessive types know there are still some major gaps in the collection. For instance, until very recently the LA punk band Fear’s 1981 appearance on Saturday Night Live—by far the strangest musical booking in SNL history and one of the most legendary televised musical performances of all time—was strangely impossible to track down in complete form online....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This weekend the Music Institute of Chicago presents a tribute to the great Billy Strayhorn, best known for his contributions (as composer and arranger) to the songbook of Duke Ellington. The festivities kick off Friday with a screening of a recently updated version of Robert Levi’s Emmy-winning documentary Billy Strayhorn: Lush Life, followed by a panel discussion with the filmmaker, scholar Henry Louis Gates, Strayhorn biographer David Hadju, trumpeter Terell Stafford, and WBEZ broadcaster Richard Steele....

Just because Soundgarden’s best years are behind them doesn’t mean that they (or their managers) don’t know what the kids are into these days. Though the band’s pre-Lollapalooza show at the Vic tomorrow night is beyond sold out, fans with access to mobile social networking sites and a lot of luck can still score tickets. Tomorrow afternoon a representative of the band—widely hailed as alternative rock’s answer to Van Hagar—will be going around Chicago dropping off tickets and “mementos,” as the press release says, at different sites....

Theatre 6 Radio dramas performed today often rely on nostalgic chuckles, but Strawdog’s goal in this hour-long evening of three new plays by Hank Boland is to bring radio into the 21st century, streaming each performance live on its Web site. Part of a series that used to be called “Wireless,” this show features seven actors, a six-piece band, and a Foley artist who hold our attention visually and aurally with vivid depictions of the plays’ exotic settings and 25 characters....

Six years ago, the band I sang for packed up a rental van and drove 2,219 miles from Los Angeles to Atlanta to tour for two weeks with New Jersey metalcore group the Dillinger Escape Plan. We’d been invited by one of the other openers on the four-band bill, and we wound up playing first night after night, three or four hours before the headliners took the stage. Somehow, in all the hubbub of arriving and familiarizing ourselves with the protocols of a large multiband tour, we never got around to making introductions with anyone from DEP....

The 6200 block of North Kenmore looks like any number of “nice” blocks around the city. It’s a pretty, tree-lined street, with a mix of old and new houses, apartments, and condo conversions. Parking is hard to come by. And there are plastic bags absolutely everywhere. Plastic shopping bags have become one of the most visible environmental scourges of city life. According to some estimates, Americans use 100 billion of them a year, and consumers worldwide run through more than a million every minute....

This Weekend The sixth annual Do-Division Street Fest pitches its tents on Division between Damen and Leavitt. This year it runs three days, not the usual two—Fri 6/1 through Sun 6/3—but it’s got the same two stages of live music. The lineups lean toward indie rock, garage, soul, and hip-hop; one is booked by the Empty Bottle Presents (the Damen Stage) and the other by House Call Entertainment (the Leavitt Stage), aka the team from Subterranean and Beat Kitchen....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve always respected Steve Drake’s counterintuitive position on euthanasia—which is that “Let’s put this poor, suffering soul out of his/her misery” usually isn’t so much sensitive as selfish. Drake, who was born hydrocephalic, and whose parents were advised by the doctor who delivered him that they should keep him comfortable and let him die, is a research analyst for Not Dead Yet, a feisty disability rights group....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Keeping up with Brazilian music isn’t easy. Few record stores in the U.S. bother to carry it, and even fewer distributors bring it into the country (though it’s getting easier to find downloads on iTunes and eMusic). It’s more than worth the extra effort to scan Brazilian music blogs like Notas Musicais—the Portuguese-language site doesn’t seem to do much curating of what gets posted, but it’s how I learned that young singer Thaís Gulin made her second album late last year....