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Kelli Wefenstette and her husband, Jimmy Thomas, try their best to live sustainably, to “close the loop,” as she puts it. They compost their trash, they grow their own vegetables in their garden, and since March 2012, they’ve gotten extremely fresh eggs from the three urban chickens that live in the backyard of their Portage Park home. Well, there were four chickens, but when one started crowing at about five weeks old, they discovered Polly—named for the Nirvana song—was a he....

DAM’s latest album It’s been a few weeks since I caught Israeli-Canadian rapper Shi 360 performing for an intimate crowd at SXSW, and I keep returning to my conflicted feelings about that experience. Shi is a talented MC with an intuitive grasp on how rhymes flow in a variety of languages, but even though Shi could spit with style I was disappointed at how often he didn’t seem to have anything substantial to say; the dude dropped a lot of cliches about peace and love, which is all well and good, but I could have used something with a little more depth....

The 16th European Union Festival runs Friday, March 1, through Thursday, March 28, at Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, 312-846-2800. Tickets are $11, $7 for students, and $6 for Film Center members. Following are selected films screening through Thursday, March 7; for a complete schedule see siskelfilmcenter.org. Superclasico Worn out perhaps by the Nazi-era tensions of Flame and Citron (2008), Danish writer-director Ole Christian Madsen vacations in Argentina with his next film, a forced and overlong romantic comedy....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Yesterday I posted about the results of the annual Jazz Critics Poll and included my individual ballot. My number three selection in the reissue category was Dogon A.D., a stone-cold classic by alto saxophonist Julius Hemphill. The album was cut in 1972 and originally released on the reedist’s own Mbari label, though it got an early reissue (with international distribution) by Arista/Freedom in 1975....

friday27 Friday27 The Big Pink, Crystal AntlersBottle RocketsThe Jesus Lizard Saturday28 AxemenThe Jesus Lizard Sunday29 Guillermo Gregorio & the Madi EnsembleRempis/Rosaly Monday30 Melt-Banana Tuesday1 The XX Wednesday2 Bebel GilbertoThe King Khan & BBQ ShowMunicipal WasteJason Stein The Big Pink headlines; Crystal Antlers and White Car open. 10 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, 773-276-3600 or 866-468-3401, $13, limited $10 tickets. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » BOTTLE ROCKETS In “Shame on Me,” from the Bottle Rockets‘ new Lean Forward (Bloodshot), front man Brian Henneman plays the role of repentant boyfriend, rattling off promises to his girl—not to waste any more days, not to lie, not to start fights—that she knows he won’t be able to keep....

Emma Batia Arnold, Très Awesome editorial and creative director, is entranced by: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Charles James: Deconstructed” I just got back from New York Fashion Week where I saw tons of fresh designers and amazing looks. That being said, some of the most beautiful clothes I’ve seen recently were right here in the Windy City at the exhibition “Charles James: Deconstructed” at the Chicago History Museum....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sounds like the pleasant dreams of reformer types—except that these guys are serious enough about it to have logged hundreds of hours producing cloutwiki.org, a new reference site that offers political bios and connecting links for dozens of local politicians. The two put together a team of journalists and political activists who over the last few months compiled an assortment of facts about Chicago aldermen, Cook County board commissioners, and area congressmen....

The only thing missing from Michael Kornick and David Morton’s nautical adjunct to DMK Burger Bar is an animatronic one-eyed pirate with a cursing macaw on his shoulder. What it does have is faux salt-blasted planks on the walls, a canoe hanging from the ceiling (are those seaworthy?), and a greatest-hits list culled from classic New Orleans oyster bars, New England clam shacks, and the extinct species of Chicago River fried-shrimp shanties....

The last time I checked in with Shimer College, late last year, the tiny, fiercely independent Great Books school was embroiled in a battle over what some saw as a right-wing attempt to take over its board and administration. That battle is still raging, with a couple new developments: a “first step” toward creating a politically conservative college within the Shimer shell and the revelation of a financial nexus that appears to be funding controversial changes....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Tribune and Sun-Times reported Thursday that convicted murderer Darrell Cannon wants to add Mayor Richard Daley and former mayor Jane Byrne to his federal lawsuit, which alleges that his confession was extracted by torture. When Cannon was convicted, 1984, Byrne was mayor and Daley was state’s attorney, and Commander Jon Burge–who would be thrown off the police force amid allegations of torture in 1993–was still running Area Two, where the detectives who arrested Cannon worked....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For his part, Colon has picked up endorsements from every other elected official in the area, though it’s not certain whether they’ll br sending over precinct workers on the day of the April 17 runoff. Which brings us to the matter of the Bruces, as they are widely known—Bruce Anderson and Bruce Embrey, two longtime independent activists who oversaw much of Colon’s successful ward operation in 2003....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Amid plenty of chatter on social media and the NYT on the deaths of Peter Kaplan and Paul Walker, I was surprised to find little mention anywhere of the death of Congolese singer Tabu Ley Rochereau, who passed away over the weekend and who the Reader‘s Peter Margasak hailed as “one of the greatest voices Africa has ever produced....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As you may already know, a Leor Galil cover story a couple weeks ago about the relationship between Chicago rappers and Chicago streetwear companies caused a stir in the local hip-hop community and resulted in a lot of bad vibes thrown our way. While I respectfully disagree with the people who criticize Galil’s story (and I suspect if they were to reread it now, after they’ve cooled down, it won’t look a bit inflammatory), I can see where folks were coming from with their hate for the photo illustration on the cover....

Dan Savage is a sex-advice columnist, cofounder of the It Gets Better Project, editorial director of the Stranger, and brother of Bill. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Which is how I wound up at Quigley Preparatory Seminary North, a Catholic high school for boys who were thinking about becoming priests. The Chicago Archdiocese closed Quigley, which was located just south of the Viagra Triangle, in 2007....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Guitarist Mike Allemana doesn’t hide his affection for Chicago jazz history. In fact, he’s been vested in seeing that it gets all of the support it needs. For years he was the working guitarist in most of the groups led by the great tenor saxophonist Von Freeman. He recently put together a quartet to feature the playing of Von’s guitar-playing brother George, who’s 86, a musician long in the shadows of his sibling and one who’s had a pretty low profile in recent years....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The food, it must be said, probably would not have tasted as good if it were not free, but a lot of it was served on sticks, which is never a bad thing, and there were Vienna hot dogs for actual sustenance. (“I went into the hot dog line and there were no hot dogs,” mumbled a man in a well-cut suit, possibly driven into a fugue state by hunger....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In defense of his picking Terry Zwigoff’s Art School Confidential as number ten film on his 2006 best list in the IndieWire critics poll, IFC News’s Matt Singer confessed that “if I wasn’t so afraid of being laughed out of the critical community, it’d be a lot higher.” Well, I can relate to that–as maybe we all can in a variety of ways–except right now I’m starting to feel a little antsy about my own critical delights....

“The future promises a diversity of models to serve diverse functions for diverse niches. The decentralization of the music industry provides a scintilla of hope. Musicians are finding ways to make music and get paid independently. The dream of being among the infinitesimal sliver who’ll get the major-label deal, score a big national hit and become a multimillionaire, is being abandoned for the more prosaic, realistic and sustainable goal of just making a humble living doing what one loves and controlling one’s own art....

Update II: CFO Paul Volpe responds (PDF). Most of it’s of the “I’m rubber, you’re glue” and “we got paid” variety, but here’s where the real throwdown is: Update III: Forgot that the city’s valuation comes up in the IG report: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Once the future revenue stream was projected, the advisor discounted this future cash flow to its value today to a private concessionaire....

Sometimes I feel that maybe I move a little too fast when it comes to relationships. I can’t be entirely certain about which is the first, second and third date because most of the time they all just kind of blend together. The only thing I can hope for is that my date and I are staying on the same page. If that can be accomplished, I can forget about the number of dates and we can move forward even though I will undoubtedly think to myself on occasion that maybe I should not have mentioned one thing and certainly should have said another....