Friday 7 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » CEALED KASKET Actually liking metal in these irony-saturated times can make you paranoid. Priestess’s jackets look suspiciously trendy to me, Early Man have the shifty eyes of former A.R.E. Weapons fans, and the Sword are so earnest it makes me think they’re up to something. But Cealed Kasket just put their shtick right on the table–“We have songs called ‘Cigarettes for Kids’ and ‘Death Train’ and a 500-year-old wizard named Sir Sarsicus on guitar”–and I love them for it....

Say you and your brood have been hunkered down for months, shivering in the 24-hour night at the bottom of a wind-blasted fjord. It’s a hard life, but you’re bred from fierce folk who colonized Scandinavia, terrorized mainland Europe, and landed on American beaches long before that Italian. Your man Sigurd slew the dragon Fafnir, say the skalds. You can take the cold. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Thorrablot was a Viking celebration....

Zero Day **** (Masterpiece) Directed by Ben Coccio Written by Ben and Chris Coccio With Andre Keuck, Calvin Robertson, Rachel Benichak, Chris Coccio, and Gerhard Keuck. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I have nothing to gain by confessing this, except perhaps a lighter edit. But it may explain why I reacted so strongly to Ben Coccio’s indie drama Zero Day (2002), which screens all this week at the Gene Siskel Film Center....

Hou Hsiao-hsien’s most minimalist film to date (2003) is a bracing return to form, a provocative and haunting look at Tokyo and the overall drift of the world that’s slow to reveal its secrets and beauties. Commissioned by the Japanese studio Shochiku as an homage to its famous house director Yasujiro Ozu, it references Ozu only indirectly, through the repetition of a few visual motifs and through details that indicate how much the world has changed since his heyday....

I am disheartened that the Reader chose to run an article that described the cruel prank pulled by Julia Rickert and her roommate Derek Erdman in 2001 [“My Muff Has Tusks!” August 19]. The snarky tone of the article, posted under the heading High Jinks, is clearly meant to entice us to find their stunt clever and amusing; instead I am thoroughly disgusted. It does not seem that the men who responded to the chat room invite were looking to commit statutory rape or a crime of any kind....

Chelsea Handler, whose show is now in its second season on E!, brutally dismisses many of the mythologies of womanhood. At Zanies last May she sportively bickered with the vocal crowd. She kicked ass on the TV show Girls Behaving Badly and unapologetically discussed her sexual adventures in her 2005 memoir, My Horizontal Life. In her stand-up she often mocks insecure men (small penises are a favorite target), rejects the demands of motherhood, and celebrates drugs, chiefly alcohol....

When CHRP founder Lane Alexander got a grant from the Chicago Dancemakers Forum a few months ago, he formed a company–BAM!–and set out to learn “new rhythms” from other tappers. He had no specific agenda, he says; he just wanted to shake things up. And during CHRP’s concerts honoring National Tap Dance Day, his new troupe of six debuts a piece with an unusual goal for a tap dance: to show the psychological process of individuation....

Louisiana guitarist Chris Thomas King started his career in the late 80s as an acoustic-blues revivalist, though he’s also integrated hip-hop into his music–his 2002 album, Dirty South Hip-Hop Blues, merged scratches and sampled beats with guitars and harmonicas. He’s back to the acoustic format on his new album, Rise (21st Century Blues), which he recorded after losing his New Orleans home and studio to Katrina. Though the music sounds like soft, unthreatening folk-rock, the lyrics are steely: on the scathing “What Would Jesus Do?...

Paul Fine used to separate the paper, plastic, glass, and metal from his garbage and take it to his parents’ house in north suburban Vernon Hills. It was a chore, but he didn’t feel he had much of a choice. There, at least, the stuff was likely to get recycled. For starters, they’re served by a range of private haulers rather than a single public sanitation department, and many of those aren’t equipped to do more than dispose of trash....

Like a classic Twilight Zone episode, Ray Bradbury’s dramatization of his famed novel melds whimsy, suspense, nostalgia, supernatural elements, and poetic rumination on the impermanence of life and the power of memory. Set in the summer of 1928 in a town inspired by Waukegan–Bradbury’s boyhood home–it depicts an encounter between 12-year-old Doug Spaulding and a mysterious stranger who may or may not be the grown-up Doug, traveling through time to rediscover his roots....

These are hard times for local government and the taxpayers who fund it. The city’s schools are so broke they’re firing special ed teachers, the county is about to borrow $200 million just to cover its basic bills, and soaring property taxes are forcing longtime residents and merchants out of their homes and businesses. So what’s Mayor Daley planning to do about it? He wants to funnel at least $550 million in desperately needed property taxes into a new downtown TIF....

Cooked up by chef Frankie Janisch, this stew (pot-au-feu? melange?) of culinary lesson, four-course meal, Jesus Christ Superstar parody, and performing waiters ends up tasting good despite its cornball excesses. Janisch works the room as well as his pans, leading us through the preparation of each menu item as it’s served by actors in pseudo-biblical bathrobes who break into song (“Frankie J, supper-star, are you the chef that they say you are?...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After ten years in business, Meritage Cafe and Wine Bar is closing January 1, but not with a whimper. On his last night chef Troy Graves will offer a seasonal five-course prix fixe dinner for $85 from 5:30 to 10:30 PM. At press time the menu wasn’t 100 percent set, but there will be curried suckling pig with charred pineapple coulis and seared foie gras (let the authorities close him down for serving the banned delicacy, Graves says); lobster ceviche with blood orange emulsion; oysters on the half shell with passion fruit sorbet; goat cheese soup with balsamic-grilled red onions; and wine-braised pheasant with chorizo grits and braised greens....

At about 6 AM on Monday, December 11, the doors of the County Building, at 69 W. Washington, swung open and aldermanic candidates poured in as the 2007 campaign officially began. Meanwhile wannabes tried their damnedest to get on TV. Jim Ginderske, who’s running against Moore, had brought his campaign chair, Tom Westgard, dressed as a goose to draw attention to Moore’s role as the leader of the foie gras ban....

A mere two or three years ago it looked like diva Mariah was going to unseat Whitney Houston as the mayor of Loco Town. In the wake of her tumultuous divorce from Tommy Mottola, the aged A and R man who fostered her career, she suffered a string of embarrassments: highly publicized hospitalizations, a terrible sound track, an even worse movie. She fell so far that Sonic Youth even dedicated a sympathetic tribute song to her....

You can meet the richest people on the way to a horse race, especially if that race is the Kentucky Derby. Three years ago, on the first Friday in May, Thomas Allen Pauly was at O’Hare waiting for his flight to Louisville. Pauly, 45, is a Chicago artist who specializes in portraits of racehorses. He goes to the Derby every year so he can paint a picture of the winner and, hopefully, sell it to the horse’s owner....

It was very busy here last night. There was one empty seat with a hat and some cigarettes on it, and while this other guy and I waited to see if a person would return, we struck up a conversation and had a cocktail. He said his name was Ray. After a while the owner of the cigarettes and the hat did come back. He was really drunk, and I guess he fancied Ray–his hands were all over him and he was sharing way too much information about his sex life....

Though they’ve been acquitting themselves admirably since 2001 as a crungy guitar-and-drums duo, I bet QUI wouldn’t have landed this gig if they hadn’t bitten the bullet last year and added a lead singer–specifically the Jesus Lizard’s lead singer, David Yow. These LA guys are doing Yow a favor too, of course, by taking him out of the “what have you done for us lately?” column. What they’ve done for us together is Love’s Miracle (Ipecac), a dirty, sweaty, fantastically tasteless train wreck of an album....

Oscar Wilde’s 1893 drama about the stepdaughter of Herod and her fatal attraction to John the Baptist (called “Jokanaan” in the play) may not be the best thing Wilde ever wrote, but it is the most unfettered: the master of English drawing-room comedies created his most idiosyncratic play in Salome, its perfumed poetry teeming with similes and high-flown images. Jimmy McDermott’s clever, assured staging for the Side Project in the tiny Side Studio captures both the play’s outsize passions and its delicate interludes....

[snip] Losing ground. From the Illinois Poverty Summit’s 2006 report: in 2000 about one in six Chicagoans was poor; in 2004, when the poverty level was around $19,000 for a family of four, the figure was about one in five. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » [snip] The L word. Prolific writer and blogger Andrew Sullivan supports Bush’s tax cuts and privatizing social security and opposes affirmative action and hate-crime laws....