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I’ve never understood the concept of a children’s museum. Children are everywhere as it is. Why would anyone pay good money to see them collected, even if it’s in a fancy new underground museum in Grant Park? According to Mayor Daley, and therefore according to the many aldermen who voted his way, it was always about the children. According to Daley’s opponents, it was about a lakefront that should remain forever open, free, and clear—not to mention the sacred tradition of aldermanic prerogative....

There are ways both official and unofficial to describe “the movies.” There’s the new releases the industry decides to push in the malls, and then there’s everything else, which we’re obliged to root out for ourselves. A schoolteacher I know in the wilds of Argentina selects and projects DVDs on a regular basis, and some of the stuff he shows—old experimental shorts, recent features by Abbas Kiarostami, Alexander Sokurov, and Gus Van Sant—is pretty specialized....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The NPR program and the local authorities it had rounded up—John Kass and Laura Washington among them—reported that Emanuel is up to his ears in problems (crime, schools, finances) but almost certain to be reelected in 2015 if he wants to be. He’s got no apparent challengers, he’s got $5 million in his reelection bank account, and Washington said she expects him to triple that by the time the campaign starts....

Never write for free. As a five-year-old child in Russia, Gary Shteyngart was paid in cheese while writing the novel Lenin and His Magical Goose. His grandmother would give him a slice of cheese for each chapter he completed, and he’s been compensated for his work ever since. It was onstage at Kahn Auditorium that the author of the memoir Little Failure and the novels Super Sad True Love Story and Absurdistan woefully told the crowd that Random House insists paying him with cold, hard cash....

One of the best things about Dina Facklis’s solo sketch show is that her characters are often oblivious to just how funny they are. They’re all the more entertaining because she delivers them–the nonbridesmaid former friend blithely spilling secrets at the wedding, the misguided mom demanding that her daughter don more makeup–with complete conviction. Equally amusing are Facklis’s turns as a health teacher appalled by her students’ easy attitude toward getting pregnant (the sex makes it worth it) and as a couples’ counselor berating her therapy group about their unwillingness to engage in trust falls....

The latest round in the battle to save Bertrand Goldberg’s Prentice Hospital was a hearing before Judge Neil H. Cohen last Friday that had me thinking it’s too bad TruTV hasn’t hit Cook County courtrooms yet. He did. At issue was a motion by the city to dismiss the lawsuit filed in November by Landmarks Illinois and the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The preservationists sued after the commission, in an unprecedented burst of bureaucratic efficiency, granted Prentice preliminary landmark designation and then rescinded it in a single afternoon....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve listened to the brand-new Black Flag record, What the . . . , their first new release after a nearly 30-year break, all the way through three times today. Black Flag is possibly my favorite band of all time, a band that I hold in very high regard in terms of musicianship, songwriting, aesthetic, ethics, and ideals, so it was really hard for me to even bring myself to listen to the new record, which seems almost like a cash-in for sole constant member Greg Ginn....

Brendan Canty is best known for drumming in Fugazi, holding down solid, tightly controlled grooves in a band that always sounded like it was about to explode. Canty also wrote guitar and bass parts for Fugazi during their 16-year run, but he didn’t front a group himself till he formed Deathfix in 2009 with Rich Morel (they met while touring in Bob Mould’s backing band) and Medications members Mark Cisneros and Devin Ocampo....

The Chicago Improv Festival, now in its 13th year, is also in transition. Artistic director Mark Sutton, who’s been with the fest in one capacity or another since the beginning, will step down after this go-round, to be replaced by Jet Eveleth, a mainstay of improv ensemble the Reckoning. The pair shared artistic duties for 2010, focusing on reenergizing the festival. Gone are the star–driven main-stage shows. Instead, the emphasis is on homegrown and upstart out-of-town groups—64 of them in all, playing a dozen rooms throughout the city....

Kyle Johnson/Wikimedia Commons Das Racist The only people who were probably more worked up about Jay-Z’s “Open Letter” than racist Fox Nation diehards are Jay-Z dorks like me, who always get excited when Jay gets pissed off and decides to recapture a little of the genius bad attitude he had around the turn of the millennium, when he was beefing simultaneously with every other rapper in the world except for Memphis Bleek....

Dave Corzine is legitimately excited about the future of the DePaul University men’s basketball program. This is a new development. Once in a generation, DePaul fields a men’s basketball team capable of beating any rival in the country. The program first made a name for itself nationally in the early 1940s with the arrival of the M and M Boys, player George Mikan and coach Ray Meyer. Both grew up humbly—Mikan in Joliet, the son of a tavern owner, and Meyer on Chicago’s west side, the youngest of ten children born to a candy wholesaler....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Barack Obama’s very first followers were a trio of middle-aged women who sat on the DCP’s board. Their backgrounds could not have been more different from Obama’s—or more similar to the great majority of blacks who had grown up in the segregated America of the 1940s and ’50s. Loretta Augustine was a native south sider; Yvonne Lloyd a southerner, from Nashville; Margaret Bagby a country girl from a small Michigan town that was a remnant of the Underground Railroad....

Last summer I wrote in the Reader that Jerry Weller, who represents Illinois’ 11th Congressional District, had stubbornly remained a member of the International Relations Committee and its western hemisphere subcommittee despite an apparent conflict of interest (“The Congressman and the Dictator’s Daughter,” August 25). Weller had married Zury Rios Sosa, a third-term legislator in the Guatemalan legislature, in 2004. Up for reelection that fall, he tacitly admitted that being on the committee and subcommittee represented a conflict of interest, telling the Bloomington Pantagraph, the largest paper in his district, that he would “recuse himself from legislation ....

The sausage party that is the Electrical Audio message boards is taking it offline for a four-day festival, June 10-13. The Premier Rock Forum BBQ Rockfest kicks off at Quenchers and then runs the next three days at nonvenue the Drug Church, with more than two dozen locals and touring bands to entertain Steve Albini‘s acolytes (and that’s not counting Friday’s karaoke party). Details on how to attend the Drug Church shows can be found by digging around on the forum....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » John Freyer of Dogfish Head Brewing Co. leads a free tasting of his company’s beers, paired with cheeses, at West Lakeview Liquors from 6 to 9 PM. The star of the show is the just-released Festina Peche, a light-bodied summer brew in a Berliner Weisse style made with peaches. Annunciation Greek Orthodox Cathedral’s three-day Taste of Greece on LaSalle Street (Fri-Sat 4-11 PM, Sun noon-11 PM) features Greek food, beer, wine, ouzo, dancing, and music by the John Linardakis Band....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Few jazz musicians boast a resume as impressive as Chicago-born-and-bred trombonist Julian Priester. Sun Ra, Lionel Hampton, Johnny Griffin, Max Roach, Booker Little, John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, Herbie Hancock, and Charlie Haden are among the bandleaders he’s worked under since the mid-50s, masterfully tailoring his exceptional skills to the needs of each. Over the decades he’s demonstrated an astonishing flexibility, whether playing straight-ahead charts or taking the music out....

Each November the Chicago Humanities Festival brings to town an embarrassment of intellectual riches for ten days (plus some bonus events in October) of lectures, discussions, performances, and more. In honor of this year’s theme—”Animal: What Makes Us Human”—we posed to some of these thinkers an embarrassment of a question, which you may remember from summer camp: If you were an animal, what would you be, and why? Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Todd Rosenberg Riccardo Muti In a more perfect world, every elementary school child would learn to play a musical instrument, every family would be able to afford tickets to Chicago Symphony Orchestra concerts, and public support for the orchestra would be so broad that there’d be no need to cultivate big corporate and private gifts. We don’t live in that world. So when the CSO held a next-season press conference at Symphony Center Wednesday, the event began with effusive thanks and a few smooches for donors, notably Bank of America (recently in the news for getting some public support of its own from the New York Fed)....

Hubbard Street Dance Chicago Harris Theater for Music and Dance, 4/1-4/5 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Cerrudo’s first attempt at making dances behave like movies was 2008’s Extremely Close, whose ingenious lighting and blank white walls on wheels produced a cinematic cutting effect. Off Screen is even more thorough and successful. Its central scenic element is a giant, floaty piece of shimmering fabric, sparkly black on one side, silver on the other....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Addressing the nation from the East Room last night, President Obama methodically made his case for a military strike on Syria. The gruesome images from the August 21 gassing in Syria had shown the world the “terrible nature of chemical weapons.” If the U.S. doesn’t respond, Bashar al-Assad and others like him “will have no reason to think twice” about using such weapons, and it will become easier for terrorists to obtain them....