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Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Prior to leaving last year’s Moniker Records showcase at the Empty Bottle, I caught just a snippet of a dark, brooding psych project called Jealousy, built by San Fran’s Mark Treise. I had initially only stopped in for a set by Stacian—Dania Luck’s one-woman show of celestial synth and unnerving vocal melodies—following the release of her full-length Songs for Cadets....

Though he labored under a crippling handicap, last spring Chris De Luca, now the sports editor of the Sun-Times, successfully predicted six of the eight teams that would play in Major League Baseball’s 2009 postseason. That’s why he’s our man of the hour: the winner of this year’s Golden BAT. His reaction was a familiar one, sportswriters thirsting for even a drop of the glory with which they shower Neanderthals....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Johnson claims the video exists, but the information he’s given that would in an ideal world indicate that it does in fact exist have been disproven. (Eric Zorn writes that the rumors are “unsubstantiated.” I think we can safely go farther than that.) More colorfully you could say that the information has been cleaned, skinned, and fried. Johnson’s response has been to lash out at anyone who has destroyed anything that he’s offered that looks remotely like proof of the video’s existence....

Wisconsin is the English spelling of Ouisconsin, which is the French rendering of Meskonsing, which is the Indian name for the river that runs through the center of the state. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Wisconsin is home to all kinds of hard-to-pronounce places, from Antigo, Ahnapee, and Allouez to Weyauwega, Wyocena, and Wonewoc. An educated guess might just contribute to your verbal blunders, and being bilingual could actually get in the way....

Former Reader staffer John Conroy spent 17 years reporting on systematic police torture at Chicago’s Area 2 headquarters. His meticulous, evenhanded coverage should’ve sparked civic outrage, forced massive police reform, and toppled Mayor Daley. It would probably have won him a Pulitzer, too, had he been writing for a daily newspaper—though it’s doubtful that a daily would’ve printed his stories, and not just because the first one, “House of Screams,” ran to nearly 20,000 words....

The other night I sat down and rewatched Howl, the 2010 indie drama about Allen Ginsberg’s epochal poem and the landmark obscenity trial that followed its publication in 1956. Writer-directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman took an admirably factual approach to their much-mythologized subject: every word of their screenplay is drawn from either trial transcripts, interviews with Ginsberg, or the poem itself. Though James Franco may seem an odd choice to play the young Allen Ginsberg, he contributes an expert impersonation, capturing every bit of the poet’s impish humor and penetrating diction....

If you consider yourself a serious diner and a thoughtful consumer of food, if you follow restaurant openings the way other people follow college football, if you’re in the habit of tracking the progress of chefs from kitchen to kitchen, if you’re willing to journey to distant points south and west and even suburban to try a place you read about on LTHForum, if you have a favorite purveyor of vegetables and another favorite purveyor of poultry, and if you have a considered opinion about whether Honey Butter Fried Chicken should serve its breasts with bones or without, you should not be eating at Blackfinn Ameripub....

Part of an occasional series of oral histories, as told to Anne Ford Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » My first feature film was The Landlord. It’s on Netflix. It’s about a guy who owns an apartment building that’s infested with demons. I did all of the corrective makeup, and I had a very, very small cameo. I played a junkie who gets eaten by vampires in a crack den....

Anna Ursyn Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Order and repetition have fascinated me my whole life,” says Ursyn, who was born and raised in Warsaw. “I look at nature and man-made constructions for composition and pattern and the way the space is organized.” Though she continues to paint and draw, as she has since childhood, she likes the way computers can Acreate identical or distorted repetitions....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Atkinson is a 55-year-old StreetWise vendor who hawks his papers in front of the Walgreens at Diversey and Halsted. He grew up Lawndale, the only child of a mother who would feed housefuls of friends and relatives who’d made the journey to from Arkansas to Chicago in the 50s and 60s. He idolized Goldie, and loved her food, but when she took sick he took over the kitchen....

Scuzzy Chicago power-pop band Scoundrel got in a nasty van accident last week in Mobile, Alabama. Details are sketchy, but this Wolf hears that the guys suffered bruises and broken bones but nothing more grave—their gear got the worst of it. Fortunately the local punk community is rallying to throw some killer benefits—including a concert on Fri 5/24 with Josh Snader, Sharptooth, Charlie the Knife, and Winters in Osaka (e-mail stmechicago@gmail....

Bill Heirens, infamous as Chicago’s “Lipstick Killer,” is the longest-serving inmate in the Illinois prison system. He’s been behind bars since the age of 17, when he confessed to three gruesome murders that dominated the news headlines throughout the summer of ’46. Meanwhile, the graying prison population has placed new demands on an already burdened prison health system, forcing medical workers to provide care that sometimes doesn’t meet IDOC’s own standards....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Season 2, 7:56 AM: “At a press conference outside the federal building, Palmer pronounces to the public that the nation is safe. . . . A woman calls for the President. . . . She reaches her hand out to him. . . . The woman is Mandy, who was hired by Ira Gaines the previous year in the plot to assassinate Palmer....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Which alderman … has advised the president of Kosovo? Scott Waguespack, 32nd Ward is married to an Illinois supreme court justice? Ed Burke, 14th Ward pushed for a citywide ban on pit bulls? Virginia Rugai, 19th Ward expressed concern that posting information online about the city’s tax increment financing program could “overwhelm” the public? Margaret Laurino, 39th Ward...

Breaking the ice and avoiding awkward pauses is not always the easiest when it comes to dating. Both people feel nervous and anxious with minds going in any number of directions. Everyone has been told to play it cool but that phrase becomes so relevant when the moment is there and it’s time to say something. Slurry speech and words just fall. Should I say something I am interested in? (Wait, I think the other person will talk....

It’s been a few years since the Ryerson steel plant on the west side has really hummed, but there’s been a Hollywood buzz around it since New Line Cinema’s A Nightmare on Elm Street set up shop there for two months last summer. And early this month came the intoxicating word that the mammoth, mostly empty factory campus was being purchased by investors and would become a film studio by January....

When the French writer Marguerite Duras died in 1996, at age 81, she left behind more than 50 novels, plays, and screenplays. It probably helped her productivity that she didn’t mind repeating herself (or that a lot of her books are really short). The North China Lover—now onstage at Lookingglass Theatre Company in an intriguing but tepid adaptation by Heidi Stillman—was the last published version of a story that pops up several times in Duras’s work....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Back in July, record shop Logan Hardware left its original spot near the corner of Western and Fullerton and moved a few blocks west to a corner storefront at 2532 W. Fullerton. While the new spot lacks some of the charm and all of the history of the old spot, which once served as the U.S. distribution headquarters for UK label Southern, the new spot has significantly more floor space and room to breathe....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Directed by Lou Adler–the man responsible for, among other things, Carole King’s Tapestry, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and Cisco Adler–The Fabulous Stains stars not only a teenage Diane Lane and Laura Dern but two Sex Pistols, one member of the Clash, and Black Randy. It’s the story of three untrained girls who form a band, get super famous, and inspire teenage girls to throw off the societal rules that tell them what they can and can’t do....

Cut to the Quick The Side Project Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The two programs playing now include 11 ten-minute works grouped under the title “Atom Smashers” and six slightly longer pieces collected as “After/math.” The latter group deals with time, memory, and distinctions between illusion and reality. Things get off to a rough start with David Alan Moore’s Unnamed Time Play, a circular tale that uses repeated phrases to suggest the interconnectedness of a shy teen, his English teacher, and a dying old man....