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Thu 12/26: Macabre at Reggie’s Rock Club Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Yuletide cheer doesn’t have to end yet. Chicago’s most metal holiday tradition is Macabre’s annual Holiday of Horror party, which happens tonight. “The holiday season can make anyone feel a little bit murderous, which is why Macabre’s annual December party is such a welcome and necessary tradition,” says Monica Kendrick. “This Chicago ‘murder metal’ trio—founded in 1984 and likely the world-record holder for longest-running metal band without a lineup change—specializes in songs about serial killers, and its Holiday of Horror show is always a sing-along spectacular of unfairly, grotesquely hooky killer tunes....

Brendan Reilly, alderman of the downtown 42nd Ward, voted in favor of the lease and continues to maintain that it was a good one for the city. But he did ask Tom Lanctot, who spearheaded William Blair’s work on the deal, to respond to criticism that the city probably could have gotten more money if it had waited for the country to emerge from the worst recession since the Great Depression....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » So surprise, surprise, from the very first frame: that art nouveau lettering in the titles and credits. Where’s it coming from, what’s it all about? Nothing I’d read gave even the slightest clue. Lots of literary speculations on antecedents and influences (Henry James, Lewis Carroll, etc). But right up front there’s an actual visual motif—it’s a MOOOVIE, after all—and nobody’s ever bothered to notice, as far as I can check on the Internet....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As we all know, Governor Palin is of the far-right, family-values, don’t-use-condoms, no-sex-till-you’re-married wing of the Republican Party, which preaches abstinence as the best way to combat teenage pregnancy. I can’t really say too much more on the subject because Republican operatives and writers — having spent years painstakingly probing the most intimate details of Bill Clinton’s sex life — have suddenly declared that the private lives of public people are officially off-limits for discussion, at least when it comes to the offspring of this year’s Republican ticket....

Army & Lou’s A favorite of Mayor Harold Washington back in the day, Army & Lou’s has been dishing up well-executed southern and soul food for more than 60 years. For starters there’s Louisiana gumbo; in the bread basket are yeasty homemade biscuits, fresh, flaky, and warm. Steak, chicken, and chops come smothered with gravy and served with corn bread: quintessential comfort food. The fried chicken has light, deliciously crispy breading; pieces are so meaty that half a chicken makes a very filling entree....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In hindsight, perhaps I shouldn’t have assigned a star rating to Short Term 12, a new indie drama I reviewed for this week’s issue—my response to the film was so personal that I spend half of the review outlining my bias. Apart from the sense of vindication I get from the movie’s loving depiction of direct-care providers, I appreciate Short Term 12 for its realism (indeed, it’s one of the most accurate portraits of social work I’ve seen in a fiction film), strong performances, and unsentimental humor....

Over the years Mayor Daley has proven to be a master at blaming the city’s budget woes on someone or something other than himself. Usually it’s the federal or state government, but this time around he has an even bigger bogeyman to blame: it’s the economy, stupid. And what does he intend to do about it? Apparently he’s hoping to spend his way out of the doldrums, via the Olympics. “The way out of a recession is infrastructure spending,” he said....

The former Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz graduated from William & Mary in 1984 with a degree in psychology and got his first gig as a stand-up about three years later–reportedly he bombed. But by the mid-90s he’d landed a recurring role on The Larry Sanders Show and his own short-lived Jon Stewart Show, first on MTV and then in syndication. Since replacing Craig Kilborn on The Daily Show in 1999, he’s practically cornered the market on political humor....

Bloodiest hesitate to call themselves a metal band, though if you’ve seen one of their shows you probably have no such qualms. “People want us to be a metal band just because of the name,” says guitarist Tony Lazzara. It’s not that simple, though: Bloodiest’s name is remarkably, even poetically brutal, but it’s far from the only thing metal about them. Musically they summon the same kind of apocalyptic, black-hole heaviness as bands like Sleep, Neurosis, Mastodon, and Slayer—bands that, needless to say, are as metal as it is possible to be....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The weird crappy live track. The album closes with a badly recorded live freestyle called “Pinocchio Story,” in which he plaints about wanting to be a real boy leading a real life. It sounds like a bootleg. Scott Plagenhoef dismisses it as a wtf curiosity, and coming at the end of such a shimmering, perfectly cold album it’s a surprise....

A stand-up since 1979, blazer-and-tie-wearing liberal Paula Poundstone stepped into the national spotlight in 1992, during the presidential campaign, as a political correspondent for The Tonight Show. Since then she’s had similar gigs and been a panelist on multiple game shows–currently she’s a regular on NPR’s Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me! Her combustible material can be satirical (“There was something I started to say … I have terrible short-term memory loss, which I like to think of as presidential eligibility”)....

In 2003, when Peter Margasak wrote about Azita Youssefi in this space, he mentioned a prerelease rumor about her solo album Enantiodromia—that it “sounded like Steely Dan”—and pointed out that this was “mildly shocking.” Youssefi had been working toward that record for upwards of three years, but until it dropped, her public persona was still that of a no-wave scene star—people knew her as the raccoon-eyed imp who fronted the Scissor Girls or the burka-clad leader of Bride of No No, not as an auteurist one-named piano balladeer....

Positively venerable at the ripe old age of 23, Rhinofest continues its run as one of Chicago’s annual go-to events for local fringe theater and performance art. Here are a few likely highlights of the monthlong dramaturgical smorgasbord curated by Curious Theatre Branch: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The kickoff production is Barrie Cole‘s I Love You Permanently (through 2/10: Fri 7 PM), in which H....

Hungarian folk dances related to courtship, military recruitment, hunting, funerals, and marriage have been passed down for centuries in distinctive regional styles. Yet I was impressed, watching choreographer Gábor Mihályi’s Hungarian State Folk Ensemble perform these medieval heirlooms, at the elements of them that were recognizably contemporary: in the karikazo, a line of women in sequined red skirts kick in unison like Rockettes; long whipping braids and twirling embroidered dresses conjure Nijinsky’s Rite of Spring in the couples’ csarda; and in the verbunk, a fleet step dance resembling a military parade, men shake out impeccable renditions of Michael Jackson’s signature leg twist, swiveling their calves dazzlingly at the knee....

In Climate Wars: The Fight for Survival as the World Overheats, London-based journalist Gwynne Dyer forecasts a none-too-rosy future for our warming planet: nations go to nuclear war over shrinking water supplies; famine is widespread; anarchy reigns. Dyer likens this moment in history to a “final exam, with the whole environment that our civilisation depends on at stake,” and assembles a battery of sources—including military officers, scientists, and policy makers—to back up his argument that either the fossil-fuel status quo goes or we do....

JAZZ | Peter Margasak Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » How much time have you spent playing in Europe in the last year or two? I haven’t really added it up, but I’ve been going several times a year for the last decade. I think last year I was there about three or four months. A number of the projects that make the trips possible are with U....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That’s the opening of Christopher Hayes’s 2005 story about Debra Shore’s energetic campaign to join the water rec board, which oversees the agency that treats wastewater—that is, sewage—and then releases it into a drainage system leading to the Mississippi. Thanks in part to the interest raised by Shore’s 2006 election, the three board spots on the ballot this year have provoked an intense, costly, and fascinating Democratic free-for-all among the trio of incumbents and five aggressive challengers....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On September 17, Louisville guitarist Nathan Salsburg will release his second solo album, Hard For to Win and Can’t Be Won (No Quarter). Until a couple of years ago I knew him only as the guy behind the Drag City imprint Twos & Fews and the curator at the Alan Lomax Archives, but it turned out he’s also a musician, and he’s been busy reminding us of that—in addition to a previous solo album, Affirmed, he also made Avos (Tompkins Square), a lovely duet recording with Chicago guitarist Jim Elkington....

Another administration plan to come up with cash—the unpopular idea to tax alley Dumpsters—has been put on hold repeatedly since last November because aldermen are weary of taking hits from angry business owners (including some whose waste haulers have already asked them to pay more even though the tax wasn’t yet in place). “All that we have are fees, fees, fees, and more fees,” said alderman Leslie Hairston. “We need to find a way to balance the budget that will keep people in the city without bankrupting them....

The Reader’s Choice: Chicago Cultural Center Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Any selection in this category will be arbitrary, but the Chicago Cultural Center recently tipped the scales for me by releasing its crowning glory, the world’s largest Tiffany dome, from 70 years of encasement in concrete and copper. This 1,000-square-foot rooftop masterpiece again has sun streaming through its 30,000 cut-glass “fish scales” to light up the jeweled mosaics and white Carrara marble lining Preston Bradley Hall—just as it did when the building opened in 1897....