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Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As part of its Smart Home: Green + Wired exhibit, the Museum of Science and Industry (57th and Lake Shore Dr.) hosts a tasting Saturday at 6 PM of sustainable, organic, and biodynamic wines and vodkas and organic cheeses; reps will be on hand to answer questions. The exhibit, designed by Michelle Kaufmann, is an actual three-story modular home outfitted with the latest environmentally friendly technologies; you can tour it during the tasting....

Four years ago, Megan and Dave Miller started up the Bang Bang Pie & Coffee food truck. It satisfied a craving many Chicagoans didn’t even know they had. Within a year, the Millers, with their business partner Michael Ciapciak, had a brick-and-mortar cafe in Logan Square. It became a beloved neighborhood institution, always crowded. There were plans to open a second Bang Bang location in Pilsen. And then, six months ago, the Millers abruptly announced they were selling out to Ciapciak and opening up a new bakery in Lincoln Square called Baker Miller that would concentrate on making bread, pastry, and, of course, pie using traditional methods....

The term “emo revival” has mutated since breaking out of the underground one year ago. What had been shorthand for describing the sound of the genre’s fourth wave has been pushed onto a whole lot of melodic punk outfits who don’t fit the mold, including many 00s bands whose Icarus-like ascent and descent in popularity contributed to the notion that emo as a whole completely evaporated. Now “emo revival” has become an in-joke in some punk circles, and it appears in one of the many tongue-in-cheek track titles on the new Christmas album from punk musician Chris Farren (of Fake Problems and Antarctigo Vespucci)....

Over the last couple weeks, while the eyes of the nation have been on the workers’ rights standoff in Madison, Wisconsin, two normally quiet Chicago colleges have seen their own labor uprisings. At Columbia College and Northeastern Illinois University, faculty and students are protesting what they call dictatorial governance and exploitation. In both cases, the plight of adjunct teachers—the dirt-cheap, dispensable day laborers of academe—is at issue. It’s a situation ripe for the push-back a union can supply—and here again Columbia has been ahead of the curve....

Now in its third year, the bountiful Harvest Chicago Contemporary Dance Festival is showcasing 28 artists at the Ruth Page Center for the Arts this weekend, many of them newcomers and out-of-towners. Last fall this potent mix of sure things and incipient next-big-things included Kristina Isabelle, who’d just moved here from Ohio. She presented Fool for Love—a “trio” for a man, a woman, and a boxing dummy. This time around she’ll perform The Floating City: Solo (2011), a draft for a longer work that will premiere in 2013, supported by the Chicago Dancemakers Forum....

GRINDERMAN GRINDERMAN (MUTE/ANTI-) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Loving music at 30, you realize how few songs are about life on the other side of 26–and how most of the ones you can find are sickeningly nostalgic for youth. It’s not sexy, it’s not rock ‘n’ roll, to dwell on the soft terror of getting older–no one addresses the feeling of life receding from under your feet....

Often with domestic attempts to popularize or synthesize Asian cuisines, one taste predominates: sweetness. To his credit, Bill Kim doesn’t try to lure babies with candy at his upscale neighborhood noodle joint Urban Belly. Instead he offers an array of pan-Asian-inspired dumplings and rice and noodle bowls with bold but occasionally wearying flavors. It’s a quick-serve, sometimes frenzied communal setting that by early indications is a winning business model. The dumplings alone could carry it; offered in five distinctive varieties, they’re tasty across the board....

QSet me straight. I married my wife several months ago after dating for three years. Things are generally excellent, except for one problem: when my wife gets drunk, she gets crazy flirtatious. She’ll dance close to people, touch them, hold hands. A couple of times I thought it went too far and I told her she was making me uncomfortable. She claims it’s just harmless friendliness/flirtation and says she would never let anything happen....

Watchers, Eternals, the Jai-Alai Savant INFO 773-525-2508 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Six years in, Guarrine and D’Ercole are the only members left from the band’s original lineup. They’re on their third drummer, Jess Birch (percussionist and keyboardist Damien Thompson joined to replace Jamie Levinson, who’d switched roles to take over from the band’s first drummer), and now their second bassist. So far they’ve lost a member shortly after finishing three of their four releases–the kind of thing that makes the customary promotional tour a giant pain in the ass....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “That pissed them off,” said Riley. But I’m not so sure. If anything, the Bulls have looked cool and composed over the first two games–a little too cool, to my way of thinking. I’m used to the playoff ways of coach Phil Jackson, who in the Bulls’ six championship runs used to routinely emphasize how each game of a series grew harder until you had to cut the other team’s heart out....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In this week’s issue we have Critic’s Choice boxes for My Dog Tulip, a feature-length animation adapted from the 1956 memoir by British author J.R. Ackerley, and Secret Sunshine, a South Korean drama by Lee Chang-dong (Oasis). Also check out our new reviews of Country Strong, a Nashville melodrama starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Tim McGraw; Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench, a low-budget urban musical that marks the feature writing and directing debut of Damien Chazelle; The Klezmatics: On Holy Ground, a documentary about the venerable Yiddish folk outfit; The Legend of Pale Male, about the red-tailed hawk that acquired an ardent following in Manhattan’s Central Park; My Uncle, the restored English-language version of Jacques Tati’s 1958 comedy classic Mon Oncle; and Season of the Witch, a medieval thriller starring Nicolas Cage....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The 25th Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival began last night at the Gene Siskel Film Center and continues through Sunday at Columbia College’s Ferguson Theater and the Music Box. As always, the highlights are plentiful and diverse, ranging from quasi-narratives to purely abstract works. In my overview of the festival, I devote more space to the former than the latter; but if I had the room, I would have given greater consideration to Phil Solomon’s Empire, the new pieces by the great Lewis Klahr, and the ineffable work in Saturday’s “Talk About the Passion” program....

Not every picture is worth a thousand words. Some are worth 20, 25, 30–the length of the caption that lets you know what you’re looking at. After months of dour warnings, the CTA shifted from four tracks to three on its north-south corridor between Addison and Armitage. The Tribune sent its photographers out to capture the suffering commuters, and posted their results online: an eight-picture essay titled “CTA Woes.” The problem is that what they were shooting was almost unshootable....

“It’s hard to look at the Cubs and the Sox as they prepare for spring training and not conclude that both teams have gone backward.” Tom Frank: It’s really simple. It’s because of the power of money in politics. This is an anecdote I heard the other day, and I don’t know if it’s true or not, but do you remember in the primaries Kerry had this line about “Benedict Arnold CEOs”?...

Legends of Madagascar On Sunday at 4 PM, Facets Multimedia will screen Legends of Madagascar as part of the African Diaspora Film Festival, with writer-director-actor-editor-composer Haminiaina Ratovoarivony scheduled to attend for a postshow discussion. On the basis of the film, I suspect that Ratovoarivony will have a lot to say. The movie takes on numerous issues in contemporary Madagascar: racial tensions between the native population and Indian immigrants, military corruption, and the challenge to preserve indigenous traditions amidst economic growth....

Honestly, if Ryan Duggan stole my girlfriend, kicked my dog, and got a job at RedEye hate-blogging about the Reader, I’d still consider him the cleverest and most inventive gig-poster designer in the city. Fortunately, Duggan is both a good friend of mine and a favorite freelance designer at the Reader (see the B Side cover of this issue), which has put his tongue-in-cheek humor and scrappy aesthetic to excellent use....

The Reader’s Choice: Lenny & Me Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I have to admit I’m not a big buyer of second­hand duds. I don’t have the time—or the inclination—to comb through rack after rack in some grim linoleum space in hopes of finding some hidden gem that I’ll then have to have altered, repaired, or cleaned. But Lenny & Me is the perfect middle ground....

Julia Thiel Terrible and not-so-terrible: Peach Mist and Fire Eater This isn’t exactly a roundup of flavored whiskeys, mostly because the idea of flavored whiskey sounds terrible to me so I’m not exactly inclined to go out and spend money on them. (I did taste some Evan Williams honey whiskey a couple years ago and remember it being unbearably sweet.) But I was recently sent samples of a couple new releases—peach-flavored Canadian Mist and cinnamon-flavored Early Times—and figured I might as well taste them....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Since journalism’s going digital, there must be advantages to a new medium that’s digital from the ground up. Testing this proposition, which has held up pretty well in New York City, DNAinfo.com on Monday launched its Chicago operation. Front and center on the new website was its first scoop: half a million dollars has mysteriously disappeared from former county board president Todd Stroger’s reelection fund....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Kristin Canty, who directed this 2010 advocacy documentary, became a raw milk convert after discovering that its natural microbes cured her son’s chronic allergies, and a crusader after hearing from small farmers about the legal hassles they face in producing it. Tracing the problem to the corrupt “swill dairies” of the mid-1800s, she shows how government-mandated pasteurization eventually ended the widespread sale of raw milk and allows intransigent bureaucrats to destroy people’s livelihoods with laws that were written for industrial producers (sound familiar?...