Giving Away the Farm Whitney and his allies argued that Meigs had pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into Chicago’s economy while relieving congestion at O’Hare and Midway, and they got support from the Sun-Times, the Tribune, Governor Jim Edgar, and state legislators from both parties. Worried that the fight over Meigs might jeopardize his plans to expand O’Hare, Daley grudgingly backed off. In December 2001 he and Governor George Ryan agreed Meigs would stay open until 2026....

Kids are natural hecklers–they can’t imagine they’re not part of the action onstage, so they speak up, talk back, and otherwise break the fourth wall. The likable Jerk Alert Productions folks harness this natural exuberance by making the audience an integral part of their improvised children’s show. The kids supply the characters’ names, their favorite foods, the scary things they’ll encounter during their adventures–and every step of the way they say how they like the story, what they think will happen next, and whether the costumes are right....

Raul Cruz would take a bullet for El Santo, so it was nothing for him to make the long trip from Oak Lawn through a foot of snow to the Congress Theater last Saturday afternoon. As vice president of the El Santo International Fan Club, it was nothing less than Cruz’s solemn duty to do all he could to secure an audience with Mexico’s greatest wrestler. When El Santo padre died, Cruz transferred his loyalty to El Hijo de Santo....

Now that he’s called President Bush a racist on live national television and dropped a Top 40 single that references the decimating impact of first-world greed on the third world (“Diamonds From Sierra Leone”), it’s easy to see why people are pegging Kanye West as hip-hop’s new conscience. But on his newest, Late Registration, there’s not a hint of abject certainty, grandstanding, or proselytizing. West speaks from an awkward place, like he’s going through puberty as he grows from awareness to actualization, and addresses it head-on: “I thought my Jesus Piece was so harmless / ’til I seen a picture of a shorty armless,” he raps, later adding, “On a polar rugby it look so nice / How could somethin’ so wrong make me feel so right, right?...

There’s nothing especially innovative about Keyshia Cole’s debut, The Way It Is (A&M)–Mary J. Blige is its obvious inspiration–but that doesn’t stop it from being one of my favorite R & B albums of the year. At just 21 the Oakland native has a solid grip on her protean voice, favoring an almost conversational middle range bolstered by a strong hip-hop rhythmic sensibility, particularly on the bumping romantic kiss-off “Guess What....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Some expected ramping-up in the legal battle over foie gras: On Monday, Crain’s Chicago Business reported that the Illinois Restaurant Association had amended its lawsuit against the city’s ordinance banning the service of foie gras. The group now claims the ordinance is unconstitutional (Daley’s basic complaint when the law was passed in August) in its attempts to regulate the sale of a national product on a local level....

Reader: Ben Joravsky, as usual, brings an interesting perspective to his discussion of the ongoing debate over the future use of Wilson Yard [The Works, April 29]. But there is more to say about this deal than was revealed in the article. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » To begin with a small point. Wilson Yard is indeed a very eccentric site: wedge-shaped, bounded on one side by the CTA Red Line, confined on two other sides by buildings....

I’m a late-20s straight man in a BDSM relationship with a dominant woman. She enjoys depriving me of orgasms for long periods of time, and she likes to keep me in a male chastity belt, a rather high-tech custom-fitted thing made of stainless steel and lined in silicone. It makes it impossible for me to masturbate or even get an erection. While it has taken some time to adjust to wearing it full-time, I can now go about my daily business quite well with it on....

I have a sexual interest in the sounds of men using the toilet. There are several restaurants close to my home, and I hide a wireless telephone headset in an inconspicuous place in the bathroom. I can then record, from my home, the sounds of men farting and defecating. My husband is aware of this and tolerates it, but he believes that this is unacceptable behavior, as it infringes on the privacy of others....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “It seems like Democratic leaders in Congress are trapped in a time warp,” the Tribune editorial commented. “They said a year ago the surge was doomed to fail. They were wrong, yet even in light of recent military success, they still demand the president set a timetable for troop withdrawal. They’re still trying to enshrine that into law.”...

On a walk one afternoon in 1981 in his new neighborhood near the Dan Ryan, photographer Jay Wolke noticed “this very strange looking homemade yellow kayak lying on an old gravel road,” he says. The river was several hundred yards away. “There was overgrown grass and a factory building, all on the underside of this monstrous expressway bridge.” Wolke saw this East Pilsen scene as a microcosm of the city, juxtaposing “anachronistic human handcrafted stuff and above it this monumental contemporary structure with life speeding along....

Friday 21 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » NOW IT’S OVERHEAD Dark Light Daybreak, due in September on Saddle Creek, is the third album of complex, crystalline indie pop from Andy LeMaster, general mastermind of Now It’s Overhead. Like his previous records, it’s basically flawless. But that’s the problem–LeMaster’s music has about as much personality as a MIDI-to-USB interface. It reminds me of those jangly post-R....

MetroKlub This past spring Friedman, president of F & F Realty, which runs the West Loop’s Crowne Plaza hotel, realized he could do something about it. He’d already been running a kosher catering service out of the hotel. He decided to expand operations to reintroduce upscale kosher dining to Chicago. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But Turano, who worked at Ted Cizma’s Naperville restaurant Elaine before moving to Dine in October 2005, also had to devise some dairy-free dishes that would be compatible with meat preparations....

The U. of C.’s 26th annual “celebration of humanistic inquiry” offers lectures, tours, and performances by faculty and staff. Events take place on Saturday, October 22; all are free, but advance registration is required (limited day-of-event registration will be available at Swift Hall, 1025 E. 58th). Call 773-702-3175 or visit humanities.uchicago.edu/openhouse for more. Empires in the Fertile Crescent Gallery tour. Oriental Institute, Mesopotamian Gallery. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Clifford Odets’s agitprop classic, about a meeting of exhausted, underpaid New York cabdrivers debating the merits of a strike, put the Group Theatre on the map when it debuted in 1935. That’s unlikely to occur with this debut by Remarcable Productions. Director Seth Remington makes dynamic use of Gorilla Tango’s cramped space, even squeezing some fun out of Odets’s creaky ploy of planting actors in the audience. And his production fairly drips with good intentions....

A History of Violence With Viggo Mortensen, Maria Bello, Ed Harris, Ashton Holmes, William Hurt, and Heidi Hayes Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You can’t logically claim that it’s both kinds of movie at once–the devices and intentions of one interfere with those of the other. Yet Cronenberg is so adept at tinkering with our thoughts about violence that he comes very close to pulling off this feat....

The plucky Chicago Opera Theater begins its first season in its new Millennium Park space, the 1,400-seat Harris Theater, with Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea, the fourth COT collaboration between conductor Jane Glover and director Diane Paulus. Glover and Paulus worked together last season on the Benjamin Britten adaptation of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, displaying the kind of attention to dramatic storytelling that’s become a COT hallmark. Poppea tells the tale of a love triangle between the emperor of Rome, Nerone (Michael Maniaci), his mistress, Poppea (Danielle de Niese), and her previous suitor, Ottone (Tobias Cole)....

Jamaica notoriously refuses to settle for yesterday’s riddims, but despite sounding like some half-forgotten mid-80s classic, Damian “Jr. Gong” Marley’s “Welcome to Jamrock” echoed through the island’s yards all summer. And as both the homicide rate and the temperatures there soared, no cry could’ve sounded as current as the song’s ancient Ini Kamoze sample: “Out in the street / They call it murder.” No less powerful overall than its title track, Welcome to Jamrock (Tuff Gong/Universal) is the most consistent Jamaican full-length in a decade....

Bluegrass pioneer Bill Monroe was one of the first country musicians to appreciate Elvis, and no wonder: from the beginning, bluegrass’s borrowing from blues and jazz marked it as modernist pop music, albeit with a carefully crafted veneer of rootsy authenticity. Contemporary revivalists, with their self-consciously down-home drawls and faux-primitive instrumentation, don’t always get that, but Del McCoury is an exception. He grew up in southern Pennsylvania in the 40s and 50s amid a family of old-time musicians; he learned guitar from an older brother but was captivated in the early 50s by Earl Scruggs’s radical three-fingered banjo style....

He Doesn’t Do Jack That afternoon Infinity Broadcasting, which owns seven radio stations in town, switched its oldies outlets in New York and Chicago to the canned genre-busting format called Jack FM. The change provoked a hue and cry among listeners and media observers alike. The next morning the New York Post ran the headline “Bloodbath at CBS-FM” (Bruce Morrow, better known as WCBS DJ Cousin Brucie, had also lost his job after more than 20 years), and on June 7 Chicago Tonight host Bob Sirott asked his audience, “I don’t really want to live in a world where Dick Biondi is not on the radio–do you?...