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Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Now Lorraine Swanson, the last editor of the News-Star, is launching lakeeffectnews.com to cover all the above territory plus Albany Park, which the News-Star covered before WSI took it over from Pioneer Press in 2008. “I was always kind of frustrated by the weekly format, and I’m looking forward to putting out a daily project,” Swanson tells me. “We live in an instant age and everybody wants to find things instantaneously....

The Green Music Fest returns to Wicker Park this weekend, its mission to promote sustainability by introducing attendees to environmentally conscious retailers and service providers; it also sets a good example itself by using biodiesel generators, requiring food vendors to provide compostable utensils, and the like. Held on Damen between North and Schiller, the festival hosts two stages of live music, one at the north end of the grounds and the other at the south....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Here’s an addendum to this week’s Hot Type. My main item concludes with a discussion of a Wall Street Journal story Sunday by Cam Simpson, a former Tribune reporter. Simpson’s thesis was that “Trib exclusive: Feds taped Blagojevich” on the paper’s front page December 5 forced the hand of the U.S. attorney because it alerted the governor to the fact the feds were listening to him and closing in....

If you’ve never seen footworking done with a live band—and who has?—here’s your chance. In a culmination of the Auditorium Theatre’s months-long Music + Movement Festival, the hip-hop arts organization Kuumba Lynx performs with jazz-and-blues-oriented band Urban Aspirations in Braid Tales . . . Remix. Choreographer and FootworKINGz member Christopher “Mad Dog” Thomas says Chicago juke music inspired the band, which really needed to speed things up to come close to the movement’s usual 170 beats per minute....

Ron Santo was of that rare ilk that you had to acknowledge his shortcomings in order to recognize his greatness. Most great athletes are self-evident—Jordan, Gretzky. Not Santo, certainly not in his later career as a baseball announcer, which is how most fans knew him when he died Thursday at the age of 70. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As a baseball analyst on the Cubs’ radio broadcasts, Santo offered little analysis....

Samad Ahmadi put two years into transforming his Edgewater auto garage into Paradise, the Middle Eastern restaurant that served as a showcase for his eye-popping, idiosyncratic outsider art. Last year he decided to get out of the restaurant business, but he wanted to preserve his vision, a riot of mosaics and bric-a-brac. He turned to his neighbor, Emebet Afework, former owner of Abyssinia Market a few doors down Broadway, who agreed to leave it mostly untouched....

In his 1994 single “Juicy,” the Notorious B.I.G. turned the 1993 World Trade Center bombings into a punch line (“Time to get paid / Blow up like the World Trade”), and after 9/11 you could feel a lot of MCs fighting the temptation to do something similar. Maybe because that tragedy was so much larger, most had the good taste to steer clear. Even eight years later, the extended 9/11 metaphor Jay-Z attempts on The Blueprint 3—proposing an analogy between the crack game and the WTC attacks on the third verse of “Thank You”—feels pretty tacky....

WHEn 10 AM-6 PM, Sat-Sun 6/9-6/10 Every year around this time people in the book business start peering at the sky and crossing their fingers–because the Printers Row Book Fair carries on rain or shine. Now in its 23rd year, this celebration of literature and book arts (run by the Chicago Tribune since 2002) draws 150 or so new, used, and antiquarian booksellers, not to mention a respectable flock of authors with new projects to plug, to the South Loop to hawk their wares....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There are few moviegoing experiences more painful than watching food porn on an empty stomach. Well, thank god for the Chicago Food Film Festival, where food simultaneously appears on the screen and on your plate. Featuring fondue, ramen burgers, low-country shrimp boil, and lots and lots of sugar. It continues through Saturday at Kendall College. “Chan Marshall, aka Cat Power, is one of the most notoriously unreliable performers in pop music, with a history of canceling shows (or bailing on them partway through) that runs all the way back to the beginning of her career....

redtheater.org The Fourth Wall: A Red Theater Documentary It’s been a quarter century since I set out to change the art world. Teaming up with a small group of like-minded students from Northwestern University’s performance studies department, I dedicated myself to creating a lifetime of nonlinear, non-narrative performance pieces that would beautiful, enigmatic, and occasionally brutal (in one of our pieces, a man slapped himself on the face—hard—with a pair of raw steaks for an hour)....

Daniel Bachman,Jesus I’m a Sinner (Tompkins Square) Jesus I’m a Sinner might just as well have been titled “Jesus, What Do I Do Next?” With last year’s Seven Pines, Virgina-born acoustic guitarist Daniel Bachman offered an intimidatingly accomplished example of the style known as “American primitive guitar”—loosely speaking, a merger of American folk idioms and raga aesthetics. This time, the 23-year-old has combined the things that made that record great with several collaborative experiments....

The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra’s greatest strength has long been its flexibility–its ability to adapt to the demands of different composers, conductors, and soloists. Three years ago it decided to replace its music director with a handful of rotating “artistic partners”–who now include violinist Joshua Bell, pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, and conductor Roberto Abbado (nephew of Claudio)–and give orchestra members more say over everything from personnel to repertoire. Just back from a European tour, the group continues its second year of a three-year residency at the University of Chicago with a conductorless program....

With so many bands orbiting the Shape Shoppe performance/recording space and its associated label, Obey Your Brain, sometimes I think it’d be easier to keep track of them all—and all their overlapping members—with a graph plotting just how complicated and frenetic each is. Then I could just point. Chandeliers would fall in the quadrant defined by the “relatively simple” and “mellow” axes, a ways off from the jazzers in Herculaneum and a world apart from the freaks in Man Man....

In Factory Theater’s slapdash spoof of James Bond flicks, Oprah Winfrey conspires with Richard Roeper and Mancow Muller to take over the city. Enter suave, sexy superagent Gene Siskel–apparently the Tribune movie reporter didn’t die in 1999, he was cryogenically frozen. Siskel and pudgy sidekick Roger Ebert (who also seems not to have changed since the 90s) give Oprah’s scheme two thumbs down, defeating her with the aid of the Windy City Rollers....

If over the past couple months you’ve frequented certain bars and cafes in Wicker Park, the Ukrainian Village, or Logan Square—the Hideout, Atomix, Rodan, the Empty Bottle—you may have noticed in each of them a small square of clear glass with the words frontier returns 09.04.10 screen-printed on it in silver ink. There’s nothing else to the message, so newcomers to Chicago could be forgiven for not realizing it’s about a local band—especially since it’s a band that hasn’t played a show in nearly eight years....

“You would look so cute without an eye to offend you and without a tongue to offend me and mine.” —Hate mail to Vashti Cromwell McCollum Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Rosenstein, a Chicago native, teaches television production at the U. of I. His best-known documentary prior to this one is In Whose Honor?, a 1997 study of Native American mascots in sports. He’s lived in Champaign since 1985, and says McCollum’s story is local lore there, which is how he came to hear about it, seven or eight years ago....

From a distance, this feature by Joel and Ethan Coen might resemble the brothers’ 1991 farce Barton Fink: like the earlier movie, it evokes a specific showbiz milieu (Greenwich Village in the early 60s) as it follows an aspiring artist (a down-and-out folkie played by Oscar Isaac) who’s based on a real-life figure (singer-guitarist Dave Van Ronk). Yet the broad, black humor of the Coens’ early features (Blood Simple, Raising Arizona) has ripened over the years into a sadder, more philosophical brand of comedy (A Serious Man) that puts them in a class with Billy Wilder and Ernst Lubitsch (yeah, you heard me)....

thursday5 Thursday5 Vic ChesnuttStefon Harris & BlackoutLions Rampant Liudas Mockunas, Martin Brandlmayr Friday6 Stefon Harris & Blackout Saturday7 Black Heart ProcessionEccentric Soul RevueStefon Harris & BlackoutAkira Sakata Sunday8 Stefon Harris & BlackoutMount EerieMelissa St. PierreJ. TillmanTopology, Akira Sakata & Chikamorachi Monday9 Joe McPhee & Fred Lonberg-HolmMelissa St. Pierre Tuesday10 Haptic with Lisa SlodkiSurfer Blood STEFON HARRIS & BLACKOUT Urbanus (Concord) is the second album by vibist Stefon Harris’s R & B-leaning ensemble Blackout, but it’s a better starting place than the group’s 2004 debut, Evolution (Blue Note)....

“Capital punishments are the natural offspring of monarchical governments,” Benjamin Rush wrote in 1792. Rush was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, the father of American psychiatry, an abolitionist, and a prison reformer, and he’s one of the minor heroes of Anne-Marie Cusac’s Cruel and Unusual: The Culture of Punishment in America. Cusac, an assistant professor of communication at Roosevelt University, singles him out as representative of a stream of reformist thought common among the Founding Fathers and their peers....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Let me name a few: Scott Bernstein, president of the Center for Neighborhood Technology; Thom Clark, president of the Community Media Workshop; Sunny Fischer, executive director of the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation; Harriet Meyer, president of the Ounce of Prevention Fund; the Reverend Calvin Morris, executive director of the Community Renewal Society; former state senator Dawn Clark Netsch; Alexander Polikoff, former executive director of BPI; George Ranney, CEO of Chicago Metropolis 2020; Jackie Taylor, founder of the Black Ensemble Theater; Judy Wise, senior director of Facing History and Ourselves....