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In fact, among the 45 aldermen who voted to approve it were Moore and two of the other sponsors of the ordinance, Ric Munoz and Manny Flores. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » THE AGREEMENT TO LEASE WHEREAS, On December 2, 2008, Mayor Richard Daley announced that the City of Chicago entered an agreement to lease the parking meters to Chicago Parking Meters, LLC, a newly created entity led by Morgan Stanley, for $1,156,500,000; and...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Felsenthal, a friend of mine, is coming out with a new book, Clinton in Exile: A President Out of the White House. Even in 2001, when he moved out on his own terms because his presidency was over, she says, it was a pretty miserable leavetaking. He was in semidisgrace, thanks to the Marc Rich pardon and stories (way overblown, according to Felsenthal) of his staff trashing Air Force One and the West Wing....

Grasshopper 510 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bucktown shoppers might be startled by how much Grasshopper 510, a new shop specializing in eco-friendly housewares, jewelry, and gifts, looks like the previous tenant, a cosmetics and lingerie boutique. That’s because the owners, not just talking the talk but walking the walk, tried to avoid as much waste as possible in their redesign of the space....

The last half hour of David Lindsay-Abaire’s new drama, Good People, suggests that he may yet become a great playwright. I know, I know, Lindsay-Abaire won the 2007 Pulitzer for Rabbit Hole, so he’s already got the American theater’s most prestigious indicator of greatness. But that Pulitzer came as the result of a kind of backroom maneuver: deadlocked on the three nominated finalists, the drama committee voted to consider a play that hadn’t made the cut, and that play was Rabbit Hole....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Must go public with a current gastronomic pash: kyuri su at the sometimes surprisingly good pan-Asian Streeterville joint Bistro Pacific. It’s possible I’m in love with their cucumber-slicing apparatus as much as the dish itself, but the end product is fabulous, regardless: icy-cold cucumber–perfectly, consistently paper-thin–a tiny unwavering bead of dark green encircling each diaphanous slice that feels in its thinness not long for this earth but still surprisingly sturdy (I really hate cucumber from which all Crunch has been excised)....

Culture Vultures “It’s sketch and improv, and a fun little show. There was a hilarious sketch about two ‘kids’ opening presents; the presents kept getting lamer, but the two performers became increasingly excited about them, jumping around. It was a very frenetic scene—I don’t know how they lasted the whole time, which must have been four or five minutes. I probably would have passed out after 30 seconds.” Through April 28, 10:30 PM, 1608 N....

Back in February I predicted that Drake’s “Started From the Bottom,” which had just entered the charts at number 63, would eventually make it near the top, which it did, peaking at number six a few weeks back. And I guessed that it might stick around long enough to make it into competition for summer jam of the year, which it has, although there is some serious competition. What I didn’t foresee is that the phrase “No New Friends,” adapted from the lyrics to the song’s breakdown, would become a street phenomenon, inspiring designs from streetwear designers and popping up in mixtape lyrics by other rappers....

America: All Better! Second City Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The show begins with a giddy Lauren Ash singing the praises of Obama as America’s savior, even as a castmate interrupts to remind her that she’s lost her home, the market’s dropped 1,000 points, and the governor just got arrested on corruption charges. By evening’s end, though, cynical pessimism has given way to an embrace of Obama’s “yes we can” rhetoric: a horror film parody finds a group of grade-schoolers reciting the PE’s victory speech as a way to stave off being eaten by a monster....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Yet is it so simple, and so blameless for Piniella? Two years in a row his team arrived too tight for the playoffs — much too tight this year — and got swept. That’s partly Piniella’s fault. And I’ve got to say, even as a self-interested member of the media, I found the Cubs’ behavior on and off the field disgusting Saturday night, when it took Piniella an hour to address the media after the final out, and not at the usual interview-room podium....

Sonny’s Gospel Legacy While it is true, as Tesser points out, that many of the musicians who Rollins encountered here in Chicago are no longer with us, Geraldine Gay certainly is. Her recent disc with her vocalist brother Donald Gay, Soulful Sounds, is terrific. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Thanks to Aaron for that assessment. Unfortunately Geraldine Gay’s recent illness prevented me from discussing her friendship with Rollins at any length....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I first heard about Locrian from Jeremy Bushnell of Rebis Records a couple of years ago, when I was writing a story about the flood of drone projects emerging from Chicago, but I didn’t actually get around to hearing them until recently. There’s certainly an element of drone in Locrian’s music: a steady, rippling hum, produced by a combo of synth, organ, and other electronics, throbs in the background of almost every track....

Dear God it’s pleasant outside. A little swampy, sure, but an early summer day one week before Halloween shan’t be grumbled about. Restaurants are likely opening patios (Small Bar Logan Square just announced via Facebook they would be) and runners are trolling the sidewalks in droves—who knows, some geniuses may even be lounging and digging their bare feet into the beach right now. And I guarantee garage doors are being creaked open and raised, and motorcycles uncovered and rolled out....

The Better Half Marriage gets a good going-over in this marriage of clowning and dance from Julia Rhoads’s Lucky Plush Productions. Based on the 1944 film Gaslight, in which a man with something to hide attempts to drive his wife crazy, The Better Half is being created and directed by Rhoads and Leslie Buxbaum Danzig of physical-theater troupe 500 Clown. The story, Rhoads says, is ultimately “about resilience inside of contemporary marriage”—but the road there is filled with humorous digressions and metatheatrical layers....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » And yet the show succeeds on pretty much every level—including the blood-alcohol level, inasmuch as you can order a carafe of Stolichnaya vodka to make the experience feel more authentically Russian. (Though, as NPR has pointed out, Stoli’s actually made in Latvia). Less lethal accoutrements of the evening include heavy red, somehow czarist curtains; starburst chandeliers; and a full-length portrait of the man responsible for the “war” in War and Peace, Napoleon Bonaparte....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This week’s long review considers Bart Layton’s The Imposter, an engrossing documentary about a French man who managed to pass himself off as a Texas teenager and win entry into the U.S. in 1997. We’ve also got new reviews of Chicken With Plums, a live-action feature from cartoonist and animator Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis); Cosmopolis, David Cronenberg’s adaption of the Don DeLillo novel, with Robert Pattinson; The Expendables 2, a sequel to Sylvester Stallone’s geezer actioner; Hit and Run, with Dax Shepard as a man fleeing his witness protection program to drive his wife to a job interview; Patang, a family drama set in Ahmedabad, India, and directed by Chicagoan Prashant Bhargava; Premium Rush, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a bike messenger being chased around Manhattan by dirty cop Michael Shannon; and Robot & Frank, starring Frank Langella as an old man whose neglectful kids buy him a robot caretaker....

The other day the notorious Manuel David Orrio asked to be my Facebook friend. You can’t place the name? Sorry. What about the martyred Orlando Zapata Tamayo? At this point I could easily segue into a brief essay on the transformation of American media—how in our wondrous new age of microlocal online news coverage, no zoning change is too trivial to be reported but complicated international stories fall through the cracks....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The three members of terrific Norwegian trio In the Country, who play the Hideout on Wednesday, all keep busy with side projects. Not only is keyboardist and composer Morten Qvenild the “Orchestra” in Susanna & the Magical Orchestra, he plays in the rock band the National Bank and works regularly with singer Solveig Slettahjell (to say nothing of his stints in Shining and Jaga Jazzist)....

A first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I started doing burlesque back in 2003, when there wasn’t much of a scene in Chicago. There were only a couple of shows running. The prospect of somebody who was a trained actor who also didn’t mind taking her clothes off was a fairly appealing prospect to the few producers who were around at the time....

A first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Quite a number of our staff members are former refugees. We are an oasis for our newcomers. For a lot of people, this is the first time they are living in apartment buildings. So they may do things like sweep their apartment and sweep out in the hallway, because that’s how they swept everything out of their hut in the refugee camp....

Adam Kempenaar, Filmspotting cofounder, host, and executive producer, is captivated by: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Arbor‘s radical conceit eschews talking heads in favor of actors lip-synching pretaped interviews with family members and friends of Dunbar, who wrote three semiautobiographical dramas about coming of age in her Yorkshire council estate. Juxtaposing these performances with street-staged productions of selected Dunbar pieces, the layers of artifice commingle in thrilling, revelatory—and appropriate—ways....