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Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tremaine “Tree” Johnson has been popping up all over the place since he landed on the Reader‘s B Side cover in August. At the end of the month MTV Hive premiered “God Listens,” a track Tree cut with North Carolina rapper Deniro Farrar; that same week Mishka released Supreme Cuts’ collaborative mixtape with Barbadian rapper Haleek Maul, Chrome Lips, which includes some great guest verses from Tree; and in September Tree announced that the full-length he’s been working on with producer Frank Dukes (Ghostface Killah, Danny Brown) will hit iTunes in November....

Now, in truth, that last part has nothing to do with rivalry week, and this year it’s got nothing to do with the Big Ten, since it’s unlikely that any conference teams will be in the national title picture, even if the next president is from the capital of Big Ten country. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » And it’s also the case that sometimes the other stuff doesn’t come true either....

Q I read the letter from the woman who had cheated on her ex and now wants to patch it up. I have a similar situation, except it was my ex-girlfriend who cheated on me. We’d been living together for a few years—we were engaged—and then she suddenly moved out “temporarily” to “work out some issues,” then dumped me several weeks later for trumped-up reasons. Stop asking for your ex-girlfriend’s absolution, sacky....

Until I heard the new Teknochek Collision (Barbes), I thought of this New York nine-piece as a pretty good simulacrum of a Balkan brass band that would never be able to go head-to-head with its models–Gypsy groups like the Boban Markovic Orkestar and Kocani Orkestar. Turns out I was wrong about that. The group, led by percussionist Matt Moran, has toughened up its sound, giving it a visceral punch missing on previous efforts....

David Posey, chef de cuisine at Blackbird, challenged Vie executive chef Paul Virant to come up with a recipe using spirulina for this installment of our weekly feature Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Told about spirulina’s history, Paul Virant complained, “Basically, David Posey has given me excrement to use? That’s bullshit. I called him, too, after I got the ingredient, and I was like, ‘Are you serious?...

Andrea Bauer Bric-a-Brac Bric-a-Brac, the brand-new Avondale record and collectibles shop mentioned in last week’s Gossip Wolf and this week’s Best of Chicago issue, is celebrating its first week of business this weekend with a grand opening party and has just announced the lineup for the event. It starts at noon and features performances from two duos: Madison-based garage darlings the Hussy and local pop two-piece Slushy. A handful of local DJs will be in and out of the shop throughout the day, including sets from HoZac honcho Todd Novak, dance producer Kid Color, and local booker (and Slushy member) Brent Zmrhal....

Among the advisers who helped put the agreement in place was Henry Henderson, the Sun Ra-quoting director of the Midwest Program of the Natural Resources Defense Council. Henderson, who previously served as an assistant Illinois attorney general and as Chicago’s environment commissioner, took a few minutes to explain to me why he thinks this is a big deal. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » We just passed our framework to the governors....

It was clear during the campaign which aspiring leader of the free world was the arts candidate. Barack Obama—his earnest mug the inspiration for a thousand loving portraits—had a brief but strong voting record on arts issues and a platform that called for more money for the National Endowment for the Arts and more art in the schools. Artists across the country took up his cause. But two months after the election, with the economy in free fall and the Middle East on fire, they’re still waiting to see exactly what his administration’s arts program will look like....

Vivian Maier’s photographs, currently on display at the History Museum, are anthologized in this new volume. Last week I finally visited the Chicago History Museum’s exhibition of Vivian Maier’s photography. If you haven’t gone, I can’t recommend it highly enough. The photographs here—which represent only a fraction of Maier’s recently unearthed collection—vividly bring to life the Chicago streets of the 60s and 70s; this room has got to be the best time machine in town....

2012 was a big year for Future, with the runaway success of his singles “Same Damn Time” and “Turn On the Lights,” and 2013 looks to be even bigger. Everyone in the game right now seems to want his druggy, demented, Auto-Tuned presence on at least one of their songs, and despite the fact that he works with a very particular sonic formula it hasn’t come close to getting old yet....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On Sunday the Chicago jazz scene is holding one of more than a dozen benefits for D’Angelo, including ones in locales as far-flung as Spain, Iceland, Norway, Italy, Belgium, and Holland (they’re all listed on D’Angelo’s home page). What’s amazing about this is how it reveals the impact a musician most people have never heard of has made all over the globe....

The South Loop has historically been a neighborhood without a political identity. In other parts of the city, neighborhoods are closely identified with their political geography. Rogers Park has long been part of the independent-minded 49th Ward on the far north side. On the far south side, Beverly is known as the heart of the 19th, the base of the South Side Irish. And Bridgeport, the home of mayors and the center of Chicago clout, is always, always, always in the 11th....

netflix “I’ve made a moderately large mistake.” I was on my way to the airport to fly to New York for a friend’s Arrested Development brunch and season four watching party (a Skip’s Scramble, cornballs, “model home fries,” fun) when a deer attempted suicide on the Blue Line tracks between Cumberland and O’Hare. All passengers were forced off the train and told to wait for shuttle buses to the two subsequent stops; the impatient among us hopped into cabs with strangers....

Before moving to Chicago in 1989, Louis Susman was a big shot in Saint Louis. Among other things, the now retired investment banker who has raised a ton of money for the Democratic Party and just been rewarded by President Obama by being named our ambassador to Great Britain, was a director of the Saint Louis Cardinals — and an active one at that.St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Rick Hummel recalls that Susman played a key role in a trade that brought slugging first-baseman Jack Clark to the Cardinals from San Francisco before the 1985 season began....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » (I don’t think the young left is unpatriotic, but occasionally their/our skepticism about the American project or even just the people who happen to be in charge of it right now can express itself in cheap ways [“George W. Bush Is a Punk-Ass Chump”]. I’m thinking in particular about hearing boos during a National Guard trailer before a screening of An Inconvenient Truth, which probably has more to do with broad, cheap cynicism and immaturity than anything terribly specific, and these expressions tend to be few and far between and are probably nothing that should keep you up at night....

Jacques Doillon’s Ponette, featuring an extraordinary performance by four-year-old Victoire Thivisol, screens at Doc Films on Monday at 7 PM. This Saturday the Siskel Center kicks off a two-month tribute to Jean-Luc Godard with 35-millimeter screenings of the director’s first two films, Breathless and Le Petit Soldat. From there the theater will present 12 more features from Godard’s trailblazing first decade and two from the early years of his late period (Hail Mary and Every Man for Himself)....

QI was wondering what you think about the Folsom Street Fair, the annual gay leather/fetish/BDSM street fair in San Francisco. Do you think it is still a socially relevant display? Or do you think that in this time when we are fighting for civil rights and equality that it does more harm than good? —Better Displaying San Francisco Straight people, of course, aren’t fighting for their fundamental civil rights. Kinky straights can marry in all 50 states, after all, and no one is pledging to kick kinky straights out of the armed forces or to write anti-kinky-straight bigotry into the U....

The limited edition Metallica pinball machine Rock musicians are one of the leading demographics of pinball players, probably because of the fact that they spend an inordinate amount of time in clubs and bars, where pinball machines usually reside, with plenty time to kill between soundchecks and set times. And, you know, because they refuse to ever stop acting like teenagers. Metallica are among the more outspoken rock star pinball fans around....

Bistro Bordeaux Pascal Berthoumieux’s picture-perfect French bistro has light mustard walls covered with small framed posters, butcher-paper-topped tables, dark wood bar towards the back, and servers in black vests and long white aprons. The French classics are covered as well. Escargots de bourgogne en croute, plump snails in individual snail-dish compartments crowned by tiny pastry puffs, came in fragrant parsley butter. Robust onion soup with lots of sweet onions bubbled beneath a blanket of tasty melted Emmental....

Q: Is it ever ok to stop being GGG? I’ve been with my husband for 26 years. Shortly after we got together, my husband disclosed a major kink: MFM threesomes. I was young and a virgin and up for anything then, but we didn’t start hooking up with other men until around year six of our relationship. Over the last 20 years we’ve been on and off with this. We had children, we took a break, and we found the time to go wild now and then....